John Branca photo by Aaron Rapoport/Corbis via Getty Images; Ralph Branca photo by Bettmann/Getty Images
right: Branca in his early days as a lawyer. “I ended up representing all my idols—the Elvis Presley estate, the Beach Boys, the Doors, and the Rolling Stones—so it all came together,” he says. below: Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca, far right, with teammates Hank Behrman, Jackie Robinson, and Cookie Lavagetto in a 1947 photo. “They were lifelong friends,” John Branca says of his uncle and Robinson.
Music filled a void in his young life. “I started buying records when I was 5 or 6,” says Branca, whose childhood collection of 45s included Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop,” the Silhouettes’ “Get a Job,” and the aforementioned Mr. Presley. At age 11, he came to Los Angeles to live with his mother, but the move wasn’t sparked by the allure of Hollywood. “I just think I was trying to survive emotionally,” Branca says. “It was really just coming out to be with my mom, getting away from my stepmom. I didn’t have any grand ambitions.” Branca’s mother made her only son take piano lessons—“which I hated”—but he began writing music in eighth grade. By the time he was 13 he was playing guitar and had started a band, the Other Half. After some trouble with the police—“just little things”—Branca’s mother sent him to boarding school. He spent almost three years at Chadwick School in Rancho Palos Verdes “until they expelled me,” he recalls. “In 10th grade I got suspended twice, just for insubordination and long hair. I still have the letter they sent my mother, it’s very funny. They said I had all the classic symptoms of a drug user—that I didn’t give a shit about my stud14
OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE
WINTER 2017
ies, I didn’t come close to living up to my potential, I was rude to teachers, you name it. In retrospect, it’s an illuminating letter.” At the time, he didn’t care, because he had formed a second group, the Pasternak Progress (named for bandmate Jeff Pasternak, son of film producer Joe Pasternak). “As soon as I got kicked out of Chadwick I got to start playing every night and we got a record deal,” Branca says. “That was ’66 or ’67. We opened for the Doors. We were the house band at Gazzari’s on the Strip. I was 16 at the time. It was incredible.” But rock ’n’ roll glory was fleeting. “My mom told me, ‘You’re either going to go to college or you can get a job,’” he explains. “I didn’t want to cut my hair, so I took the GED and went to L.A. City College.” He entered as a music major, but quickly discovered that was a bit different than jamming into the psychedelic night on the Sunset Strip. “I’d look around those practice rooms and I realized, I’m not really that good at this,” he says, “so I got out of music.” Branca excelled in other classes, however, and thus began his transition from a kid who’d “hated high school and junior high” to a blossoming student. “I knew then, ‘I have something,’” he says of his newfound academic confidence. After getting mostly A’s at LACC, he transferred to Oxy as a junior, majoring in political science. “It was a whole other level of academic rigor,” he says. “I loved Occidental. The professors were incredible.” Graduating cum laude and scoring well on the LSAT, Branca matriculated at UCLA School of Law, completing his studies in
1975. He took a position at Kindel & Anderson in estate planning—a “ridiculous” fit, he admits, “but I was happy to have a job at a top firm. I did really well on estate planning at UCLA”—and his professor, Susan Prager, served as Oxy’s 13th president decades later. A 1975 Time cover story on “Rock’s Captain Fantastic,” Elton John, prompted a career shift for Branca. “There was a quote from an entertainment attorney,” Branca recalls. “I had never really thought about that job.” He started to think about it. After applying to several entertainment firms, Branca was offered a position at Hardee, Barovick, Konecky & Braun in its corporate department reviewing contracts and setting up corporations for a client list that included Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, and George Harrison. Branca’s mentor, David Braun, “thought I was too square to be one of the music guys,” he says. “They had a guy who set up corporations for Dylan and did the touring contracts, but he wouldn’t get to hang out with the client. I got put in that division.” Branca handled all the clearance work for Renaldo & Clara—a docudrama-concert hybrid co-written, directed by, and starring Dylan, which was released in 1978 with a nearly four-hour running time. (“It’s about the essence of man being alienated from himself and how, in order to free himself, to be reborn, he has to go outside himself,” the future Nobel laureate told Playboy interviewer Ron Rosenbaum.) He was also tasked with talking Dylan out of investing in the business of “a friend from Minnesota who claimed he could extract hydrogen from water. [Braun] didn’t want to be the one to tell Bob no, so I had to be the one to deal with this—which was ridiculous, but I got to spend time at Bob’s house in Malibu when I was 26 or 27.” The turning point came in 1978, when Warner Bros./Reprise chairman and CEO Mo Ostin dispatched Branca to deal with the Beach Boys and their mercurial leader, Brian Wilson, after the group’s attorney tried to deliver a Christmas album—on December 1, a bit late for the holiday season—to fulfill their contract with Warner (having signed a new deal with CBS). “I was this young punk of 27, but I stayed up all night long reading everybody’s memos,” Branca says. He ultimately wound up taking over the meeting— “There was one legal point that came up and