LARRY HARRIS,
1947-2017

Larry Harris, the No. 2 man at Neil Bogart’s Casablanca Records, died on Dec. 18 in Port Angeles, Wash. He was 70.

The New York Times reported the cause was an abdominal aneurysm.

Bogart first hired Harris, a Brooklyn native who graduated from the New York Institute of Technology, when he was running Buddah and Kama Sutra. Harris became a promotion man in 1971 and two years later, when Bogart founded Casablanca, he took Harris with him.

Their first signing was a band they had auditioned at Buddah, KISS.

Harris became senior vice president and managing director of the label in 1976 just as the label was becoming the prime disco imprint with Donna Summer, Village People, Parliament and Lipps, Inc.

Harris left the company at the end of the 1970s. He moved to Washington in 1989 and in 2002, opened a comedy club, the Seattle Improv.

Harris wrote a book about his experiences at the label, And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records, with Curt Gooch and Jeff Suhs. It was published in 2009.