My old friend, Joel Katz, died Friday in Atlanta. He was 80 years old and had been suffering from battling PSP aka Progressive Supranuclear Palsy which often presents as Parkinson’s.
Joel was a partner in Atlanta based Greenberg Traurig for decades. He literally put them on the map in the music world with clients like the Grammy Awards, the Country Music Awards, and dozens of artists including Justin Timberlake, James Brown, Jimmy Buffet, and so on. There wasn’t an R&B star out of Atlanta who Joel hadn’t represented.
There literally wasn’t a star or a top record executive who Joel didn’t have as a client, from Clive Davis to LA Reid, and everyone in between including Republic Records’ Monte and Avery Lipman, Warner Records’ Tom Corson and Big Machine Label Group’s Scott Borchetta.
Very often I would say to Joel during a casual call or meet up, What about so and so, referring to some big deal in the news. He’d reply, “Who do you think did that deal?” or “You know they’re my client.” Of course, they were, and we’d laugh about it.
At one point right before he died, Michael Jackson became a client (they’d known each other since the Jacksons Victory Tour in 1983). Two days after Michael died, I was sitting on the terrace at the Beverly Hills Four Season with Joel, having an iced tea. Astonished we looked the bills Dr. Arnold Klein had just sent Michael for thousands of dollars in charges for Demerol, etc.
Joel was on his way to meet Michael’s family, via an invitation from Jermaine, who Joel had also worked with. A couple of hours later I saw him in the hotel lobby. He looked like he’d survived a nuclear blast. “What’s wrong?” I asked. Joel shook his head. “I’ve known a lot of difficult people,” he said, “but these were the worst.” Nevertheless he helped the Estate sort out Michael’s will and other matters.
Joel had a lot of experience handling tricky matters for his celebrity clients. In May 2006 he raced from Atlanta to Dubai when famed producer Dallas Austin was arrested. Customs officials at the airport had found a small amount of cocaine in Austin’s possession. The producer was immediately take to jail, court, and convicted. Austin, who is in his 30s, had been sentenced to four years in prison. But Joel managed to get him released and brought him home with the help of another client, Senator Orrin Hatch, who had deep ties to the UAE and was also a music fan.
It was a complicated effort, requiring Joel to hire local lawyers to help him. When he returned, he told me, “I was lucky to get out of there.”
Joel was not a saint, but his heart was always in the right place. He endowed a law library in his name at the University of Tennessee that’s flourishing today. He helped a lot of artists get deals that either started their careers or enhanced them. He was always low profile about it. He was a great friend to me, and I always enjoyed our many chats. I will really miss him and his unique take on the calamitous music world. As Irving Azoff said in Joel’s obit, he was a mensch.
Thanks for everything, Joel!
