POP MUSIC : Return of the Golden Boy : Rallying from bankruptcy and drugs, the former titan of Southern rock re-enters the record business after a decade in exile

The pop world is littered with recording artists whose lives were shattered by fast-lane excesses, but there’s also a trail of executives whose careers were derailed. None of those power brokers fell as far or as hard as Phil Walden.

Walden’s hair is graying now, but he still has the strong, determined jaw and the passion in his speech that remind you of the time in the ‘60s and ‘70s when he was the golden boy of the record industry.

He wasn’t just the financial king of Southern rock, but also someone widely credited with helping elect Jimmy Carter President of the United States.

As one of the nation’s most successful managers and record company owners in those years, Walden used to savor the moment when the first copies would arrive of the latest album by such acclaimed, history-making clients as Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers Band.

Yet Walden, 51, was never more touched than on a recent evening at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank when he was handed the first copies of a new Capricorn Records release by a Georgia band called Widespread Panic.

“I had tears in my eyes when I picked up the first copy of the album,” he says, recalling the moment the following day.

“When I turned the CD sideways and saw that Capricorn logo again, I had to walk over in a corner and be by myself for a few seconds. It was the realization of the dream that kept me going all these years . . . the only thing some days that kept me going.”

The album marks the re-entry of Walden into the record business after a dozen years of exile. In a joint venture with Warner Bros., Walden again heads Capricorn Records, the label he founded in 1969 and that served for years as the citadel of Southern rock until its collapse in 1979. Among the Capricorn acts at the time: the Allmans, the Marshall Tucker Band, Elvin Bishop and Wet Willie.

The timing of the Warner Bros. move seems perfect. Excited by the success in recent years of such varied Southern bands as R.E.M. and the Black Crowes, record companies--including MCA, Zoo and, possibly, Irving Azoff’s Giant--are racing to strengthen their Southern ties.

But much of the pop business community was no doubt shocked to find that Warner Bros.--as part of its Southern expansion-- was taking a chance again on Walden, a man whose name in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s had become virtually synonymous in some quarters with arrogance and drugs.

Industry doors closed on Walden not just because his Capricorn empire ended up in bankruptcy, but also because of how he handled himself in the aftermath.

Walden stares at the glass of mineral water on the table in front of him during an interview in a Beverly Hills restaurant when asked about those dark days. It’s as if he still has a hard time figuring out what made a confident, articulate, driven man lose his company, his marriage, even--eventually--his will to live.

“My failure to get another deal was due in no small part to my arrogance,” he says of his early-’80s attitude. “We had elected a President--or that’s what people were all saying--and we had all these gold and platinum albums. So I wasn’t about to let anybody tell me what to do. I didn’t want to start over. I wanted to start with another (empire).”

Eventually, Walden had made the round of all the companies and ended up back home in Macon, Ga., spending night after night snorting cocaine and drinking cognac until the early morning hours. By the mid-’80s, he was burned out emotionally and physically.

“I can remember praying before I went to sleep some nights that I wouldn’t wake up,” he says now, shaking his head. “I wanted out. I would walk into a room and sense people whispering, ‘Do you know who he used to be?’ ”

Borrowing from friends and selling off pieces of his estimated $5-million to $7-million art collection for years to support himself, Walden was finally frightened--and humbled--enough to swear off the drugs and alcohol. On Dec. 30, 1986, he began cleaning himself up so that he could make one more run at the record business.

After three months, he felt strong enough to begin making the rounds of companies again. But it would be four years before he would find a deal--and again hold a Capricorn album.

Invincible . That’s the word that Walden offers after a few seconds of thought when asked to explain the sense of confidence and power he felt during the headiest days at Capricorn in the ‘70s.

It wasn’t a cockiness based solely on his success with Capricorn Records, but also on his earlier success as a manager and/or booking agent for such R&B; and blues acts as Sam & Dave, Joe Tex, Clarence Carter and Arthur Conley.

Growing up in Macon, the home town of Little Richard and James Brown, Walden fell in love with R&B; music and began booking and managing local groups while still in high school. His first act, a vocal group called the Heartbreakers, consisted of two car hops and a guy who worked at the local bus station.

It was with the Heartbreakers at an amateur contest at a Macon theater that he met the young singer who would eventually be his first great star: Otis Redding. Before Redding died at age 26 in a 1967 plane crash, the singer and co-writer of such classic Stax Records hits as “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and the posthumously released “Dock of the Bay” had become the most acclaimed soul singer since Sam Cooke and Ray Charles.

Through his relationship with Redding, Walden learned about race relations in the South--and it was his regional pride in a new, more enlightened South that would eventually make him such a big supporter of Jimmy Carter.

“Being involved in black music helped me discover this whole new culture that I didn’t know much about except through the stereotypes in the movies,” Walden says of his early days with the bands in Macon. “Segregation was still very real in the South, but we had a totally integrated company and I felt Otis and I were a part in helping break down some barriers.”

When Carter became governor in 1970, Walden--who had already started Capricorn, with the Allman Brothers as its biggest act--saw the election victory as a step forward, a chance to show the world that the old stereotypes were out of date. The men eventually met and Walden later worked on Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign.

The key to Walden’s role in the Carter campaign wasn’t the amount of money he raised through a series of benefit concerts--just a few hundred thousand dollars--but the timing of those concerts. The money was crucial to keeping Carter’s campaign alive until he could build national identity and support.

Walden was so intensely committed to Carter that he stopped dabbling in the drugs that had slowly become a part of his life. “(Carter) was such a puritan and I didn’t want to blow any opportunity he had,” he says. “I was pretty much under a microscope during those times and so I just cut out everything.”

After the election, however, Walden gradually started drifting back into the old habits, though it just seemed to him in keeping with the indulgences that were throughout the record business in the ‘70s--a time when profits were escalating so fast that everyone began to feel invincible.

“I think everyone was carried away a bit with that great growth period, particularly a label like Capricorn that virtually came from nowhere to a dominant position in the business,” he says.

“I remember a time when the Allmans were at their pinnacle and each band member had five or six roadies, including his own road manager. The underlying factor, I guess, is greed because in order to get that next album from the band, you do what it takes. They want a pink elephant in the dressing room? You make sure they have a pink elephant in the dressing room.”

Several things contributed to the eventual fall of Capricorn. The Allman Brothers broke up. The record industry went into a financial tailspin. A change of distributors didn’t work out. As the problems mounted, the drugs escalated.

The years between the bankruptcy in 1979 and the start of the comeback in 1987 are something of a blur now for Walden.

“Where did the time go?” he says now, ruefully.

The early attempts at re-entering the record business were humbling. “Rather than walking in immediately into any office like in the old days, I would have to take a seat in the reception room and wait sometimes for more than an hour,” he says. “Most of the people I saw were candid enough for me to dismiss any idea--for a long time--that they were going to work with me.”

Through a friend later in 1987, Walden met and eventually began managing Jim Varney, the Ernest P. Worrell character in movies and TV.

By late 1989, Walden had regained enough self-esteem to begin another assault on the record business. Again, it wasn’t easy. The old Walden was still fresh in a lot of executives’ minds.

“No one ever told me, ‘Phil Walden--over my dead body,’ ” said Lee Phillips, a prominent Los Angeles record industry attorney who worked with Walden during this period, in a separate interview. “It was more unsaid than said, but there were . . . obvious concerns.”

Going to Warners was especially touchy because Walden left bitter feelings with some at the company when he bolted the Warner records complex in 1977 to move distribution of his Capricorn label to rival PolyGram Records.

“I must say my first phone call to (Warners Bros. chairman) Mo Ostin was certainly greeted with surprise,” Phillips added. “I just spoke very positively to Mo, saying I had had two or three meetings with Phil . . . that he has been absolutely on time, totally together, that he really has the drive to do this again.”

Ostin agreed to meet with Walden in the summer of 1990 and they began a dialogue that lasted more than six months before Warners offered a deal.

In the Beverly Hills restaurant, Walden--who now lives in Nashville and is back with his family--uses words like mission and drive to describe his outlook these days.

“I didn’t go to Mo or (Warners Nashville head Jim Ed Norman) with any established artist . . . only a dream,” he says. “I told them that we are right on the brink of a real renaissance in Southern rock ‘n’ roll and that Capricorn can be at the forefront.

“I said the company can be a lightning rod for talent in the area--the bands that will be the influence in the ‘90s that the Allmans were in the ‘70s and R.E.M. were in the ‘80s. They didn’t ever make me play them a tape or say ‘Show me that you’ve got that big new act,’ they just listened to my dream and they eventually said, ‘Let’s make it happen together.’ ”

Robert Hilburn is The Times’ pop music critic.