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