Mike Curb

Mike Curb has led a long and varied career in and out of music. Born in 1945, he was a college dropout who managed to found his own record label in his early twenties, sell it for a six-figure sum, and parlay his reputation in the music industry into the job of running MGM Records. He simultaneously established himself as one of the earlier and more visible "cultural conservatives" in American popular culture. When Curb took over MGM Records at the end of the 1960s, while he was in his mid-twenties, he began a very public "clean up" of the label by dropping all of the supposed "drug-oriented" acts from the label's roster. This resulted in the departure of The Velvet Underground to the greener pastures of Atlantic Records (for which they recorded what was arguably their best album, Loaded), and the elimination of most of the psychedelic acts on the label. In their stead, MGM (which already had The Cowsills on board) became known as the home of The Osmonds -- the singing Mormon siblings were Curb's crowning glory at the time, and were followed onto the roster a couple of years later by The Defranco Family of Canada. These safe, squeaky clean, wholesome acts, built around family units, all stood in sharp contrast to the image that most rock was presenting at the time.

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