He was famous as the manager of many of the most popular and successful performers of folk and folk-rock music, including Bob Dylan; Janis Joplin; Peter, Paul and Mary; the Band; Odetta; Gordon Lightfoot; and Ian & Sylvia.
He attended Chicago's Lane Technical High School before graduating from the city's Roosevelt University with a degree in economics.
The group signed with Warner Bros. Records instead and Atlantic's executives later discovered that it was because music publisher Artie Mogull had introduced Grossman to Warner executive Herman Starr, from whom Grossman was able to extract an unprecedented deal that gave the trio complete creative control over the recording and packaging of their music.
When Grossman signed Janis Joplin and her four bandmates from Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1967, he told them he would not tolerate any intravenous drug use, and all five agreed to abide by the rule.
On October 4, 1970, 2+1⁄2 months after the dissolution of his contracts with Dylan, his most famous remaining client, Janis Joplin, died from a heroin overdose.
Grossman refused to speak about her death to journalists or colleagues in the music business, leaving his employee Myra Friedman to handle the phone calls that flooded their office.
Grossman testified that he had never known the extent of Joplin's substance abuse when she was alive, and that he secured the accidental death policy "with air crashes in mind.
[14] In 1974 he also assisted Howard Alk with the creation of the feature-length documentary Janis, locating and using black and white film footage in which the singer says she is satisfied with Grossman as her manager.
[15] Over the course of his career, Grossman's client list included Todd Rundgren, Odetta; Peter, Paul and Mary; John Lee Hooker; Ian and Sylvia; Phil Ochs (early in his career); Gordon Lightfoot; Richie Havens; the Pozo Seco Singers; the Band; the Electric Flag; Jesse Winchester; and Janis Joplin.
April 1972, Grossman attended a launch party in London hosted by Kinney (WEA), set to distribute the Bearsville label in the UK, with initial album releases by Todd Rundgren, Lazarus and Foghat.
This was soon after leaving his original group Nazz and during the early 1970s Rundgren worked extensively on record production projects, either for the Bearsville label or for Grossman's other clients.
"[19] In his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan describes first encountering Grossman at the Gaslight cafe: "He looked like Sydney Greenstreet from the film The Maltese Falcon, had an enormous presence, always dressed in a conventional suit and tie, and he sat at his corner table.
"[19] Because Grossman was committed to commercial success for his clients, and was frequently surrounded by socialist enthusiasts of the American folk-music revival, his manner could generate hostility.
In a milieu of New Left reformers and folkie idealists campaigning for a better world, Albert Grossman was a breadhead, seen to move serenely and with deadly purpose like a barracuda circling shoals of fish.
In one memorable scene, he works with musical entrepreneur Tito Burns to extract a good price for Dylan's appearance on BBC One television.
The director of Dont Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker, said of Grossman's management tactics, "I think Albert was one of the few people that saw Dylan's worth very early on, and played it absolutely without equivocation or any kind of compromise.
He was also briefly portrayed as the manager of the fictional Bob Dylan (Hayden Christensen as Billy Quinn) in the 2006 film Factory Girl.
[22] In the film, fictional folk singer Llewyn Davis (played by Oscar Isaac) auditions for Bud Grossman, who replies: "I don't see a lot of money here."
"[24] After this comment, Grossman offers Davis a part in a band he is about to put together, consisting of two guys and a girl, which one journalist notes is "a reference to Peter, Paul, and Mary, the trio that Albert Grossman put together in 1961—ultimately choosing Noel Paul Stookey as the third member of the group, rather than Van Ronk, whom he also considered."