From Mississippi Roots to Music Mogul

By JIM BEAUGEZ  •  Photos courtesy BRADFORD COBB

Tunica native Bradford Cobb became one of LA’s top music-biz magnates, but Mississippi is still home

     For football fans of Mississippi’s two largest universities, 2014 was already a season to celebrate—both the Mississippi State Bulldogs and Ole Miss Rebels were amid historic, whirlwind seasons. 

     A ten-win State team, led by future NFL star Dak Prescott, spent three weeks at number one in the first-ever College Football Playoff rankings. Ole Miss, also a top-five team during the season, eventually got the last word by winning a hotly contested Egg Bowl.

     But on October 4, Oxford was the center of the college football universe, thanks in large part to a highly successful but behind-the-scenes alum named Bradford Cobb.

     That morning, as news spread that pop superstar Katy Perry had arrived on campus to serve as ESPN College GameDay’s celebrity guest picker, the Grove swelled with curious onlookers. Perry charmed co-hosts Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit during the telecast, going 7–2 in her game picks, and she won over the crowd by hoisting a corn dog in the air to deride Ole Miss rivals LSU.

   Those television theatrics—and indeed, much of Perry’s career—were organized in large part by Cobb, a Tunica farmer turned music mogul who bet on himself and won big. Since moving to Los Angeles in 1998, Cobb has worked with artists like the Go-Go’s, the best-selling all-female rock group of all time; the B-52’s; and Tracy Chapman. For the past two decades, Perry has been his number-one client.

     Growing up in the north Delta countryside, Cobb worked on the family farm, where his parents, Brad and Brenda Cobb, grew cotton and soybeans. When they weren’t in the fields, his father would spin records by bands like The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, who found inspiration in the music that sprang from the flat alluvial land where the Cobbs lived. 

     As a college student, Cobb studied English but didn’t feel a pull to any specific vocation. Without realizing it, though, he was already assembling the foundation of his future life’s work in music. 

     Cobb’s initiative in sending a demo from his friends’ band, This Living Hand, to E Pluribus Unum Records—an upstart label fronted by Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz—landed the group a recording contract. Then, an internship with William Morris Agency in care of Amory native and Hollywood super-agent Sam Haskell put him in the LA headquarters of one of the world’s largest talent firms—in the mailroom, to be specific, but close enough to see how the entertainment business worked.

     “I realized the manager is the one who is involved in all aspects of the artists’ career, and the music agent is really taking direction from the managers,” says Cobb, now 50, from his home in LA. “You’re much more involved and in direct partnership with the artists themselves.”

     Yet, after graduating in 1996, Cobb returned to Tunica to work on the farm. He stayed for a year and a half—long enough to know with certainty his passions lay elsewhere. So, in 1998, he loaded a moving truck and drove west, finding a home with Steve Jensen and Martin Kirkup at Direct Management Group, which happened to be the same office where he mailed This Living Hand’s music a few years earlier.

     “I had to take some chances and see where the road goes and know that no decision would be a fatal move,” he says. “I just needed to get off the starting block and explore and try some things, like I did with the internship.”

     At Direct Management Group, he learned how to manage artists and deal with different personalities, using the communication skills he picked up in college to establish rapport with roster artists. “Sometimes you have to be like a psychologist, so there were all these skills you need,” he says. “You have a very close relationship with the artist. They can’t be your best friend, but you have to know them like they are.”

     Cobb met Perry through a friend of a friend in 2004 when he was looking for a new young artist to sign with the management company. She already had a production deal with Glen Ballard—the Natchez native behind Alanis Morrisette’s massive 1995 album Jagged Little Pill and co-writer of the #1 Billboard Hot 100 hits “Man in the Mirror” for Michael Jackson and “Hold On” for Wilson Phillips—but the handoff to Cobb went smoothly. Cobb then guided Perry to sign with Capitol Records, and they readied her breakthrough album, One of the Boys.

     “She stood out and made you curious enough to pay attention, and she took full advantage of it,” he says. While One of the Boys worked its way up the charts in the summer of 2008, Cobb landed Perry a spot on the Vans Warped Tour traveling festival, a move that gave her credibility with the punk rock crowd—typically a more cynical bunch than the pop audiences who would soon embrace her.

     “We were playing in dirt fields day after day after day, and she was attracting bigger and bigger crowds, and she really earned her chops,” he says. “She became a better performer, and she earned the respect of all the people that worked for her and all those punk bands.”

     As Perry’s star rose, Cobb continued his role as her behind-the-scenes advisor and manager. The industry took notice, too, as Billboard named him to its 40 Under 40 list in 2013 and then to its Power List of top 100 music executives. In 2022, he finally stepped on stage to deliver the commencement address at his alma mater, twenty-five years after skipping his own graduation ceremony. He implored the new graduates to find their passions and get moving.

     “Not everybody agrees with the ‘follow your bliss’ mantra,” he says, “and I understand what they’re saying—like, ‘Don’t you know that job pathway has a success rate of five percent?’ I get it. But I’m glad Katy didn’t say that, and I think my dad’s glad The Rolling Stones didn’t say that.”

     On that crisp Saturday morning in 2014, #11 Ole Miss pulled off a fourth-quarter comeback against #3 Alabama, sealing a 23–17 win on a 10-yard touchdown pass with less than three minutes left on the game clock. Vaught-Hemingway stadium was set to explode, and as time ran out, fans rushed the field and began tearing down the goalposts in celebration.

     Perry hopped the brick wall, too, and when her security guard lunged to catch a fan who had planted a kiss on Perry on his way into the crowd, she ducked into the melee. Cobb, who was celebrating with Oscar-winning actress Octavia Spencer, says she disappeared for ten minutes.

     “The security guard was beside himself—he was so freaked out,” Cobb says. “But she was happy as can be among the fans, fearless as always.”

      Today, Cobb returns to Mississippi more often than ever. His homes in LA and Oxford are decorated with paintings and photography by artists from the state, and he makes a point to underscore that while he lives in L.A., Mississippi is his home.

     “With my clients, I’ve been lucky to travel all over the world, and there are very few places that still have the warmth and joy for me that the Mississippi Delta does,” he says. “I really do miss it, and I’ve been coming back a lot more over the years.”