WHAM BAM: BAM magazine, which annually compiles...

WHAM BAM: BAM magazine, which annually compiles a list of the 100 most powerful figures in the music business, upped the ante this year by giving its first Man of the Year award to industry mega-mogul David Geffen. In return, Geffen gave the mag a blunt interview using the kind of profane language one could never imagine hearing from Michael Ovitz or Lew Wasserman--or language printable in a family newspaper. It also made clear why the Geffen Records chief has nearly as many show-biz enemies as friends. (It should be noted that he considers Pop Eye one of the former, terming us “an idiot.”) Here’s a few highlights from the Geffen interview, which appears in the BAM issue due out this week:

On reports that he engineered Walter Yetnikoff’s ouster at CBS Records: “Walter’s behavior was finally unacceptable to the people he worked for. You just can’t walk up to women and say, ‘Jiggle your (breasts) for me.’ . . . Walter did it to himself. But let me say this: If I could have pushed a button and done it, I certainly would have pushed the button. You know why? There would have been such a rush to that button that I doubt I’d have gotten there first.”

On recent unflattering portraits of him in GQ, Spy and Julia Phillips’ “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again”: “I never met the woman who wrote the GQ article or the guy who wrote the Spy article. I mean, I read three different versions of the Brian Rohan story (a lawyer who reportedly punched Geffen in the Polo Lounge) in three different articles, none of which were true. . . . It has little to do with me. But somehow or other, the story has a lot of importance for people, because what they’d really like to say is, ‘He’s incredibly successful. He’s still young. He’s talented. He must be the biggest (expletive) in the world.’ ”

On refusing to release a controversial record by rappers the Geto Boys: “I’m not going to put out records which make it OK to talk about murdering women, cutting off their heads and (expletive) dead bodies. I do not want to make money from that. . . . Warner Bros. feels differently about it. They’re in the volume business. They want to put out anything they can that will give them volume and profit. Very frankly, I don’t.”