Herb Cohen

Herb Cohen (b. New York, 1933) is a record company executive and businessman, best known as the manager of Frank Zappa and many other Los Angeles-based musicians in the 1960s and 1970s.

After a period in the army, he moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, and started to put on concerts with folk singers such as Pete Seeger and Odetta. He also worked as a Funeral Home night watchman, and began running coffee bars and folk clubs, such as The Unicorn and Cosmo Alley, during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

He began acting as manager for many artists, his eventual roster including Screamin' Jay Hawkins, George Duke, Alice Cooper, Tom Waits, Tim Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Theodore Bikel, Charles Bukowski, Monica Peterson and Linda Ronstadt.

He is best known as the manager of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention from 1965, arranging their first club dates and, after encouraging record producer Tom Wilson to see them perform, securing their first record deal. He and Zappa went on to set up and jointly own the Straight, Bizarre, and DiscReet Records labels with Zappa. After a ten year association, he and Zappa parted company amid litigation in 1976.

In recent years, he has resided in a Penthouse suite at the prestigious Franklin Towers in Los Angeles. In 2007, he was elected to the Franklin Towers Homeowners Association's Board of Directors with an impressive 91 votes. Once on the Board, he was part of a Board majority that sought to replace Association's manager, Gila Brown. He currently serves on the Association's Capital Project II Committee. His term expires in 2009.