Neville Brothers

Of their first signing to A&M Records in 1981, Art Neville told The Wall Street Journal, "After [Bette Midler] heard us play at Tipitina's, we spoke and she said she was going to tell Jerry Moss of A&M Records about us. She did, and we were signed."

"One of the great things about doing [Yellow Moon] and working with [producer] Daniel Lanois is that rather than going into a studio somewhere, he kind of built the studio around us. We got this big house in uptown New Orleans near our neighborhood and he brought in all his equipment and set it up acoustically. We would play and he would experiment with placement of microphones and speakers. So we could play without using headphones. The way recordings were done in the old days." By August 1991, the album had sold over 800,000 copies worldwide.

"[Our music is] a combination of different influences. It's rhythm and blues, it's funk, it's jazz, it's African, it's Caribbean, it's Creole, it's swamp!...we just call it a 'gumbo.' Make sure there's a lot of different ingredients."

Fiyo on the Bayou was a funky version of the Neville's concert. The album did not sell well and A&M dropped the Neville Brothers.

In 1981, an unknown Whitney Houston shared back-up vocals with her mother Cissy Houston on the Neville Brothers Fiyo on the Bayou album.

To support the release of Live on Planet Earth, A&M concentrated promotion around New Orleans Jazz &Heritage Festival. The Nevilles opened and closed the festival and made appearances at the festival. A&M issued a three-track promotional CD to adult alternative radio stations.

"We just wanna keep writing songs, and keep making records, and be heard. This is our life, you know? We just wanna keep living it and pave a way for the ones coming behind us, so it won't be so hard for them, "Aaron Neville told Steve Pond.

In 1988, the Nevilles signed with A&M Records for a second time. Patrick Clifford was a long-time fan of the band and brought them back to A&M. Clifford told Cash Box about Steve Ralbovsky, senior VP of A&R, thoughts on signing them.  "Well, you know they've been here before, they made a great record for us Fiyo on the Bayou, but there's four different lead singers, they don't get played on black radio, no one plays them at AOR radio," and Clifford felt the Neville Brothers knew what they wanted to do and the key was to capitalize on that. 

"Sure, we looked long and hard about picking up a band that we had made a record with in the past, Fiyo On the Bayou, but when you do re-sign a band, I think that there's an implied commitment that you're making. Plus the fact that the band has been able to continually wow people in a live context--there are many more people in 1989 who have had the opportunity to see and hear the band than there were the last time out in '81. So I think things have come full circle."

"We're going to try to not miss any opportunity here. The live aspect is very key, because it's really the band's strength and it's in that context that you see how deep they are in terms of their ability to play, their ability to communicate, their musical roots, their passion. So that's going to be a very big part of it--getting them out there and taking advantage of their shows."

"We're also going to go back wo where we feel they have a natural constituency:  act colleges. Not that they've been a big college act, but they've done a lot of playing and touring and they have a reasonably strong cult appeal at the college level. We're going to really try to take advantage of those people who are in the know at college and get them to hopefully do some of the work for us, in terms of word-of-mouth and peer pressure."

"We're going to go to the upper demo--people in their mid-30's who have had some experience with the band over the last 10 years--we're going to try to find them at NAC with a possible release at that format. And in addition to that, we're going to try to create new bases at urban radio, where they've never had any success. We're going to black radio with this--we did a remix of 'Sister Rosa' with the guys who work with Public Enemy, and it's a real hot, immediate mix that we think is going to have some success; there's also a Jonathan Demme-directed video of 'Sister Rosa.' And we're going to try to take it to the CHR marketplace and try to have it compete at the stations that can play this kind of sound. More the major market hot stations than the secondary and tertiary markets." --Vice president of promotion, Al Cafaro,  Cash Box April 1, 1989