I was pulling credits off Rickie Lee Jones’s Balm in Gilead when I noticed the management line: Danny Goldberg, Gold Village Entertainment. The name didn’t click immediately. Then I flipped over my copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind — and there he was again. Same person managed both of them.
Danny Goldberg co-managed Nirvana from 1990 through 1994, the years that included Nevermind. According to his own website and his 2026-updated memoir Bumping Into Geniuses, he ran Gold Mountain Entertainment from 1983 to 1992, and its client roster included Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, Sonic Youth, and Rickie Lee Jones. He was inducted into the Personal Managers Hall of Fame in 2024.
The Rickie Lee Jones connection checks out on Discogs: Goldberg is listed under Management on Balm in Gilead (2009), released on Fantasy Records. The Bonnie Raitt connection falls within the Gold Mountain years — Nick of Time came out in 1989, right in the middle of Goldberg’s tenure. Multiple sources, including the Personal Managers Hall of Fame and a 2019 Pantheon Podcasts interview, confirm Bonnie Raitt was a Gold Mountain client during that period.
So the same person was shepherding Rickie Lee Jones’s career while Kurt Cobain was recording Nevermind in a Los Angeles studio, and while Bonnie Raitt was cutting Nick of Time with Don Was in Santa Monica. Three artists, three entirely different sounds, one manager.
What makes Goldberg unusual is how long he’s been doing this. He reviewed the 1969 Woodstock Festival for Billboard Magazine. By the early 1970s he was doing PR for Led Zeppelin and became vice-president of their Swan Song Records label. He went on to chair Atlantic Records and then Warner Bros. Records before returning to artist management. The thread from Woodstock to Nevermind runs through one career.
I had all three of these albums on my shelves without realizing they shared this connection. Rickie Lee Jones sitting next to Nirvana next to Bonnie Raitt — three records that sound like they come from different planets, but they all passed through the same office on the way out the door.