Local Treasures: Curb’s Enthusiasms

Mike Curb has parlayed his music industry successes into life-altering educational projects.

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Maybe it’s because his career was initially founded on the creative act of songwriting, but even when talking to Mike Curb about dry matters of business or politics, you sense the sheer inspiration that drives him. It doesn’t matter if you’re only speaking with him on the phone — you can still hear the enthusiastic gleam in his eye as he describes a “Eureka!” moment, or stops to wonder “What if?”. Plainly put, he’s enamored with the possibilities of the world.

The Mike Curb Institute for Music at Rhodes College, launched in 2006 with funds from the Mike Curb Family Foundation, embodies some of that energy, taking a uniquely hands-on approach to music education, partnering with the city’s many music industry enterprises to give students both nuts-and-bolts experience and a deeper understanding of Southern music’s cultural and historical roots.

Case in point: the meteoric rise of 2023 Rhodes graduate Lina Beach, who, through an Institute project that involved students in a recording session by the great bluesman Bobby Rush, discovered that the source of her favorite Al Green hits was none other than Royal Studios. Over a couple of years, through a combination of pluck and her own talent, Beach wound up interning at the studio, cutting her own material there, and ultimately touring the world as the official guitarist of the Hi Rhythm Section, who backed Green’s ’70s hits and still perform widely today. Beach credits the Curb Institute for kickstarting it all, telling Rhodes’ online news blog that it “helped me find a community of students with the same passion for music I have.”

Beach’s story is one of many that the Mike Curb Institute has set in motion. What’s striking is just how much Curb’s own career benefitted from a similar leg-up when he was only 18, long before he distinguished himself as an executive and politician. Of course, there was no college institute to rely on then, only the opportunity that a sympathetic ear could offer him.

Finding that opportunity was something Curb pursued single-mindedly from a very young age as he played piano and wrote songs for his group, The Arrows. “I was a Cal State [Northridge] student,” he recalls, “and I wrote a song called ‘You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda.’ I used to walk down to Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard, where there were a lot of independent record companies, and I would try to play them my songs. So one day I was at Capitol Records. I don’t even know how I got in there, but I saw Bobby Darin, and I followed him onto the elevator.”

Darin, of course, was a pop star by then. “In 1959, he’d recorded ‘Mack the Knife,’” Curb explains, “which became one of the biggest hits of all time on Atlantic’s subsidiary label, Atco. Then in the early ’60s, he moved to Capitol Records.”

When Curb sidled into the Capitol Records elevator, Darin, only in his mid-20s himself, was already a music industry veteran. “I’d never met him before, but I knew all about him,” says Curb. “And I let him know, in my pitch, how much I liked his records. So he knew that I wasn’t joking. I told him that I had recently started a publishing company and he asked, ‘Oh, are you a songwriter?’ I said yes … so he invited me to his office on the sixth floor of the Capitol Tower.”

Curb played Darin his demo of “You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda” and that was Curb’s lucky break. Darin, claiming the song’s publishing rights, saw an opportunity as well, and called Honda’s ad agency. A new version was recorded for Mercury Records by The Hondells and “they selected my song to be the theme for the Honda commercial,” remembers Curb. “So for a couple of years, whenever you turned on the radio, you heard ‘You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda.’”

In fact, the song was an act of sheer chutzpah. As Curb confesses, “I’d never even ridden a motorcycle.” Marveling at his nerve in hindsight, Curb says, “It’s funny, remembering it all these years later. I guess I had nowhere to go but up.”

Did Curb inherit such gumption from his FBI-agent father, or was it just a quirk of fate? Whatever its source, the young self-taught songsmith was clearly driven, going from success to success from that point on, learning to write songs, produce records, and score films. In 1965 he scored Skaterdater, which won the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, opening still more opportunities.

At first, he tended to score edgy, motorcycle-themed flicks like The Wild Angels with Peter Fonda. “I was doing some things as a songwriter, but I think where I really excelled was as a producer,” he says. “Then, when I would do music for the movies, I would get the rights to put out the soundtrack album on my little record label, Sidewalk Records.”

That “little” label was scoring big. It seemed the young Curb had an ear for hits, producing Linda Ronstadt’s first recorded work with the Stone Poneys for Mercury, in addition to releases on his own fledgling label. By 1969, with the venerable MGM Records flagging somewhat despite its acquisition of the jazz-centric Verve Records, the soundtrack giant merged with Curb’s Sidewalk imprint, and Curb was tapped to head the MGM label. Sidewalk became Curb Records. That same year, he co-wrote a new American Bandstand theme, which the TV series used until 1974.

The Seventies were Curb’s salad days in the music business, as he produced hit after hit for MGM, leaning in a decidedly middle-of-the road direction with singles like Sammy Davis Jr.’s “The Candy Man” and Donny Osmond’s “Puppy Love.” He also pioneered the new sound known as Christian Rock, and became outspoken in his stance against drugs. Eventually, politics beckoned. He oversaw the music at Richard Nixon’s 1973 inauguration, and then, encouraged by Ronald Reagan, successfully ran for lieutenant governor of California in 1978, often serving as a foil to Democratic Governor Jerry Brown. But he remained rooted in the music business and Curb Records carried on.

Amid all these developments, he was solidifying his ties to soul music and Memphis. “I always loved Black music,” Curb notes. “I was able to sign and produce Solomon Burke. I signed Lou Rawls. And the first Black executive ever in the major labels, Eddie Ray, put together Sidewalk’s distribution agreement with Capitol in 1964, 60 years ago.

“Later, Eddie moved to Memphis and introduced me to Al Bell, who was the head of Stax at the time,” he continues, “and Al and I partnered on Shaft. I was overseeing the music for MGM, and that was an MGM movie. Quincy Jones was supposed to score it but he got tied up in another project. So MGM asked me to find someone to replace him, and I was having dinner with Al Bell and asked him if Isaac Hayes could score, and Al said, ‘Well, Isaac doesn’t read music.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t read music very well either. But how do you feel about him?’ Al said he could score, so the rest is history. We put the record out in partnership with Al Bell, it was released on [Stax subsidiary] Enterprise/MGM Records, and it was very exciting. Of course, Isaac won an Academy Award for that.”

Sometime later, Ray cooked up plans to start a music business school known as The Tennessee College of Recording Arts & Sciences. “I think at one time he was the only professor there. But it was very interesting, very exciting,” Curb says. He contributed “a few thousand dollars” to the budding program, but beyond that, he says, “I got interested in music business education, though it was really Eddie’s idea.”

Half a century later, the list of music education projects that Curb has funded is lengthy, largely centered on his adopted home of Nashville. Belmont University, for example, sports the Curb Events Center, the Curb Café, the Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business, and Ocean Way Studio. His largesse has also funded the Curb Conservatory at the Country Music Hall of Fame and renovations to the legendary RCA Studios A and B. All of which speak to Curb Records becoming increasingly focused on country music, over six decades and counting . In 2001, the label was named Country Music Label of the Year by Billboard magazine.

But Curb has also maintained a steadfast commitment to Memphis, his endowment of the Mike Curb Institute for Music at Rhodes being the prime example. With Dr. John Bass serving as its director, Billboard has listed it as one of the nation’s top music business schools and the Institute maintains vital links with other musical landmarks in Memphis.

Of course, that includes Elvis. “One of my biggest things in Memphis,” reflects Curb, “was when my wife and I bought Elvis Presley’s former [pre-Graceland] home on Audubon. We refurbished it and then, after we started the Curb Institute at Rhodes, we used the Elvis Presley house as kind of a laboratory for the Institute.” For a time, before a small fire and some flooding brought them to a halt in 2017, the Elvis home hosted unforgettably intimate, student-run concerts, including performances by Memphis jazz legends Charles Lloyd and George Coleman. (Rhodes has plans to resume the Audubon Sessions concert series in the future.) Meanwhile, the Institute’s archives, including the Stax Oral Histories collection, exemplify its prioritizing of history in other ways.

Most recently, Curb has pivoted to Beale Street and other landmarks of Southern music history. “We’re hoping to do on Beale Street what we did in Nashville’s Music Row, where we bought quite a few buildings,” he explains. “We sponsor the Memphis Music Hall of Fame’s awards every year, and we have now partnered with the Rock ’n’ Soul Museum and [its executive director] John Doyle. We just jointly purchased the Hard Rock Cafe building, which is kind of the anchor building for Beale Street, and we’re going to move the Rock ’n’ Soul Museum over there shortly. And we already have the Music Hall of Fame there.”

He pauses, reflecting on what’s in store for Memphis, then adds with his usual contagious enthusiasm, “We’re going to do something really special here.”