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- Ahmet Ertegun (1923-2006) - The Greatest Record Man Of All Time
Ahmet Ertegun (1923-2006) - The Greatest Record Man Of All Time
Ahmet Ertegun (1923-2006) - The Greatest Record Man Of All Time Part 2
Atlantic set up shop in a tiny suite on the ground floor of the broken-down Jefferson Hotel on 56th Street in Manhattan. From the start, Ahmet had a vision of what he wanted to put out on Atlantic. "Here's the sort of record we need to make," he once said. "There's a black man living in the outskirts of Opelousas, Louisiana. He works hard for his money; he has to be tight with a dollar. One morning he hears a song on the radio. It's urgent, bluesy, authentic and irresistible. He can't live without this record. He drops everything, jumps in his pickup and drives twenty-five miles to the first record store he finds. If we can make that kind of music, we can make it in the business."
The reason for the demand was simple. America was still a racially divided nation. In even so sophisticated a city as New York, as Ahmet would later recall, "Harlem folks couldn't go downtown to the Broadway theaters. They weren't even welcome on 52nd Street, where the big performers were black. Black people had to find entertainment in their homes - the record was it."
Ahmet's first major signing was the singer Ruth Brown, whom he had seen perform at the Crystal Caverns club in Washington. On her way to New York to perform at the Apollo Theater in October 1948, Brown was in a car accident and broke both her legs. On January 12th, 1949, Ahmet brought her a contract to sign while she lay in bed. He then handed her a book on how to sight-read and a large tablet on which she could scribble lyrics while she recovered. Atlantic paid the portion of her hospital bill not covered by insurance.
When Ahmet had first seen Brown perform, her biggest number was "A-You're Adorable," a Perry Como song that was completely mainstream. As he did with so many black artists who had lost touch with their own musical roots, Ahmet pushed Brown toward a funkier and more down-home sound. In October 1950, she had a Number One R&B hit with "Teardrops From My Eyes." In 1953, she recorded "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" with Ray Charles directing her backing band. The song, which Ahmet had her do at four different speeds until he found the one he liked, stayed at Number One on the R&B charts for five weeks and helped put the label on solid ground. By then, many people were calling Atlantic "The House That Ruth Built."
Because music publishers were not eager, as Ahmet said, to provide material to "a hole-in-the-wall company called Atlantic," he began writing songs himself. In a recording booth located in a Times Square arcade, he would make a vinyl demo of a song that he would then play for the artist in the studio. Using the pseudonym "Nugetre," his last name spelled backward, so he would not embarrass his family, Ahmet wrote "Don't You Know I Love You" and "Fool, Fool, Fool," which were hits for the Clovers in 1951.
One Friday during the noon show at the Apollo Theater, Ahmet saw Big Joe Turner, who was already thought to be past his prime and had recently been dropped from Columbia, struggling as the vocalist with the Count Basie Orchestra. After the show, Ahmet looked everywhere for Turner only to find him drowning his sorrows in a nearby bar. Telling Turner he was the greatest blues singer ever, Ahmet said that all he needed was new material and persuaded him to sign with Atlantic. He then wrote "Chains of Love" for Turner, which went to Number Two on the R&B charts.
In 1952, Ahmet signed the artist who would come to define Atlantic: Ray Charles. Up to that point, Charles had been playing in the smooth style of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown, and had recorded a minor hit called "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand" for Swingtime. Wanting to push Charles toward a grittier sound, Ahmet wrote two songs for him, "Heartbreaker" and "Mess Around." Although the session is portrayed in a different manner in Taylor Hackford's 2004 film biography, Ray, Charles had never before played boogie-woogie piano. As Ahmet began explaining the sound he wanted, Charles suddenly began, in Ahmet's words, "to play the most incredible example of that style of piano playing I've ever heard. It was like witnessing Jung's theory of the collective unconscious in action - as if this great artist had somehow plugged in and become a channel for a whole culture that just came pouring through him."
When the Army called Herb Abramson up in 1953 to serve in Germany during the Korean War, Ahmet brought in the Billboard writer who six years earlier had coined the term "rhythm & blues." Jerry Wexler, an intense, brilliant former street kid from Manhattan's Washington Heights section, became a partner in Atlantic Records for $2,063.25. Ahmet took Wexler's money and bought him a green Cadillac El Dorado, the only kind of car in which a self-respecting record man could then be seen. Ahmet, who had always been cooler than cool, was now working alongside someone who generated heat like a steel-mill blast furnace. The two made an incredible pair.
The ultimate story of their time together, which both men loved to tell, concerned the night in New Orleans when they went to find an unknown genius named Professor Longhair who was playing in a joint across the river, where no taxi driver would take them. Their cabbie dropped them off in the middle of a field. After walking a mile in darkness, they saw a brightly lit house in the middle of town so full of people that they seemed to be falling out of the windows as music blared. Talking their way past the guy at the door, who assumed they were cops, the pair made their way inside. Out came Professor Longhair, who played a piano with an attached drumhead that he would hit with his right foot. As people danced, Ahmet and Jerry could barely contain themselves. An utterly primitive, completely original artist was making a kind of music they had never heard before. Rushing up to Longhair after his set was over, they told him just how much they wanted to sign him to Atlantic. "I'm terribly sorry," said Longhair. "I signed with Mercury last week." In Ahmet's version of the story, the pianist then added, "But I signed with them as Roeland Byrd. With you, I can be Professor Longhair."
By the time Herb Abramson returned from the Army in 1955, Jerry Wexler had physically and psychically taken over his role at the company. Rather than break up their studio partnership, Ahmet put Abramson in charge of a subsidiary label, Atco, and gave him the Coasters and a young piano player named Bobby Darin to work with. By then, Atlantic had moved to a brownstone at 234 West 56th Street. Pushing back the desks at night, Ahmet and Jerry would record in a room with a creaking floor, a sloping ceiling with a skylight in the middle and a young genius named Tom Dowd, who was studying nuclear physics, behind the board. Using the third eight-track recording machine ever made, for which he invented faders to replace the knobs, Dowd recorded "Save the Last Dance for Me" by the Drifters.
During this period, those in charge of Atlantic began to realize that their target audience was no longer rural and black. Rather, it was teenage and white. The message had come through loud and clear for the first time in 1954, when Big Joe Turner's version of Jesse Stone's "Shake, Rattle and Roll" was covered initially by Bill Haley & His Comets and then Elvis Presley. In a 1954 essay in Cashbox magazine, Ahmet and Wexler wrote that the blues would have to change to meet the tastes of the bobby-soxers who were looking to find their own sound. What Jerry Wexler chose to call "cat music" would be "up-to-date blues with a beat and infectious catch phrases and danceable rhythms.... It has to have a message for the sharp youngsters who dig it." To put it another way, the blues had a baby, and they called it rock & roll.
In 1955, Nesuhi, who had married and moved to Los Angeles after his studies for a Ph.D. in philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris were interrupted by World War II, announced he was going to work for Imperial Records, the label on which Fats Domino recorded. Ahmet could not bear the thought of his brother laboring for a competitor and persuaded him to come back to New York to head Atlantic's jazz division. Within a year, Nesuhi had signed and recorded the Modern Jazz Quartet and jazz bassist Charles Mingus.
Nesuhi also brought Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had written and produced "Smokey Joe's Cafe" and "Riot in Cell Block #9" for the Robins on Spark Records. Although the practice was then unheard of in the industry, Ahmet signed them to work as independent producers. In 1957, after two of the Robins left Spark to form the Coasters on Atlantic, Leiber and Stoller's "Searchin' " and "Young Blood" became a huge two-sided hit for the label.
Having failed to produce a hit with Bobby Darin, and feeling as though his time at Atlantic had come to an end, Herb Abramson left the company in 1958. Cash-poor, Ahmet and Wexler managed to raise enough money to buy out Vahdi Sabit. In return for his $10,000 investment in Atlantic, he received between $2.5 million and $3 million, quit dentistry and moved to the South of France. Ahmet and Jerry also bought out Miriam Abramson, thereby making themselves and Nesuhi the sole owners of Atlantic Records.
When Ahmet learned that Bobby Darin was thinking about leaving the label, he took him into the studio in May 1958 and cut "Splish Splash" and "Queen of the Hop," both of which became big hits because Ahmet wanted Darin to aim his music squarely at the kids who watched American Bandstand on TV each day. Ahmet's great success with Darin led him to Los Angeles, where he began looking for lucrative pop acts. Concerning the early years at Atlantic, Wexler would later write, "We weren't looking for canonization; we lusted for hits. Hits were the cash flow, the lifeblood, the heavenly ichor - the wherewithal of survival." Nonetheless, he found it hard to adjust to the company's new direction. "As Ahmet grew older," Wexler wrote, "he grew less judgmental and more interested in a wide range of commercial forms, especially white rock & roll. I stayed with what I knew and loved."
With money now flowing into the Atlantic coffers, Ahmet was once again living the kind of life he had first learned to love while growing up, with "chauffeured cars, servants, cooks and per diem" in embassies all over the world. In a striking photograph from that era, Ahmet, resplendent in a dark suit with a white silk tie and matching pocket square, can be seen doing some sort of dance step with a gorgeous fashion model named Rosalie Calvert. Both hold drinks in their hands.
During this period, Ahmet hit upon the idea of hiring a bus, which he equipped with a bar so he and all his friends could drink as they went from club to club together. On the rare occasions when Ahmet found himself alone at the end of an evening, he would say, "Let's go home," and the driver would take him to the very stylish El Morocco (known as "Elmer's" to its regulars) on 54th Street for more drinks and more fun.
The reason for the demand was simple. America was still a racially divided nation. In even so sophisticated a city as New York, as Ahmet would later recall, "Harlem folks couldn't go downtown to the Broadway theaters. They weren't even welcome on 52nd Street, where the big performers were black. Black people had to find entertainment in their homes - the record was it."Ahmet's first major signing was the singer Ruth Brown, whom he had seen perform at the Crystal Caverns club in Washington. On her way to New York to perform at the Apollo Theater in October 1948, Brown was in a car accident and broke both her legs. On January 12th, 1949, Ahmet brought her a contract to sign while she lay in bed. He then handed her a book on how to sight-read and a large tablet on which she could scribble lyrics while she recovered. Atlantic paid the portion of her hospital bill not covered by insurance.
When Ahmet had first seen Brown perform, her biggest number was "A-You're Adorable," a Perry Como song that was completely mainstream. As he did with so many black artists who had lost touch with their own musical roots, Ahmet pushed Brown toward a funkier and more down-home sound. In October 1950, she had a Number One R&B hit with "Teardrops From My Eyes." In 1953, she recorded "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" with Ray Charles directing her backing band. The song, which Ahmet had her do at four different speeds until he found the one he liked, stayed at Number One on the R&B charts for five weeks and helped put the label on solid ground. By then, many people were calling Atlantic "The House That Ruth Built."
Because music publishers were not eager, as Ahmet said, to provide material to "a hole-in-the-wall company called Atlantic," he began writing songs himself. In a recording booth located in a Times Square arcade, he would make a vinyl demo of a song that he would then play for the artist in the studio. Using the pseudonym "Nugetre," his last name spelled backward, so he would not embarrass his family, Ahmet wrote "Don't You Know I Love You" and "Fool, Fool, Fool," which were hits for the Clovers in 1951.
One Friday during the noon show at the Apollo Theater, Ahmet saw Big Joe Turner, who was already thought to be past his prime and had recently been dropped from Columbia, struggling as the vocalist with the Count Basie Orchestra. After the show, Ahmet looked everywhere for Turner only to find him drowning his sorrows in a nearby bar. Telling Turner he was the greatest blues singer ever, Ahmet said that all he needed was new material and persuaded him to sign with Atlantic. He then wrote "Chains of Love" for Turner, which went to Number Two on the R&B charts.
In 1952, Ahmet signed the artist who would come to define Atlantic: Ray Charles. Up to that point, Charles had been playing in the smooth style of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown, and had recorded a minor hit called "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand" for Swingtime. Wanting to push Charles toward a grittier sound, Ahmet wrote two songs for him, "Heartbreaker" and "Mess Around." Although the session is portrayed in a different manner in Taylor Hackford's 2004 film biography, Ray, Charles had never before played boogie-woogie piano. As Ahmet began explaining the sound he wanted, Charles suddenly began, in Ahmet's words, "to play the most incredible example of that style of piano playing I've ever heard. It was like witnessing Jung's theory of the collective unconscious in action - as if this great artist had somehow plugged in and become a channel for a whole culture that just came pouring through him."
When the Army called Herb Abramson up in 1953 to serve in Germany during the Korean War, Ahmet brought in the Billboard writer who six years earlier had coined the term "rhythm & blues." Jerry Wexler, an intense, brilliant former street kid from Manhattan's Washington Heights section, became a partner in Atlantic Records for $2,063.25. Ahmet took Wexler's money and bought him a green Cadillac El Dorado, the only kind of car in which a self-respecting record man could then be seen. Ahmet, who had always been cooler than cool, was now working alongside someone who generated heat like a steel-mill blast furnace. The two made an incredible pair.
The ultimate story of their time together, which both men loved to tell, concerned the night in New Orleans when they went to find an unknown genius named Professor Longhair who was playing in a joint across the river, where no taxi driver would take them. Their cabbie dropped them off in the middle of a field. After walking a mile in darkness, they saw a brightly lit house in the middle of town so full of people that they seemed to be falling out of the windows as music blared. Talking their way past the guy at the door, who assumed they were cops, the pair made their way inside. Out came Professor Longhair, who played a piano with an attached drumhead that he would hit with his right foot. As people danced, Ahmet and Jerry could barely contain themselves. An utterly primitive, completely original artist was making a kind of music they had never heard before. Rushing up to Longhair after his set was over, they told him just how much they wanted to sign him to Atlantic. "I'm terribly sorry," said Longhair. "I signed with Mercury last week." In Ahmet's version of the story, the pianist then added, "But I signed with them as Roeland Byrd. With you, I can be Professor Longhair."
By the time Herb Abramson returned from the Army in 1955, Jerry Wexler had physically and psychically taken over his role at the company. Rather than break up their studio partnership, Ahmet put Abramson in charge of a subsidiary label, Atco, and gave him the Coasters and a young piano player named Bobby Darin to work with. By then, Atlantic had moved to a brownstone at 234 West 56th Street. Pushing back the desks at night, Ahmet and Jerry would record in a room with a creaking floor, a sloping ceiling with a skylight in the middle and a young genius named Tom Dowd, who was studying nuclear physics, behind the board. Using the third eight-track recording machine ever made, for which he invented faders to replace the knobs, Dowd recorded "Save the Last Dance for Me" by the Drifters.
During this period, those in charge of Atlantic began to realize that their target audience was no longer rural and black. Rather, it was teenage and white. The message had come through loud and clear for the first time in 1954, when Big Joe Turner's version of Jesse Stone's "Shake, Rattle and Roll" was covered initially by Bill Haley & His Comets and then Elvis Presley. In a 1954 essay in Cashbox magazine, Ahmet and Wexler wrote that the blues would have to change to meet the tastes of the bobby-soxers who were looking to find their own sound. What Jerry Wexler chose to call "cat music" would be "up-to-date blues with a beat and infectious catch phrases and danceable rhythms.... It has to have a message for the sharp youngsters who dig it." To put it another way, the blues had a baby, and they called it rock & roll.
In 1955, Nesuhi, who had married and moved to Los Angeles after his studies for a Ph.D. in philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris were interrupted by World War II, announced he was going to work for Imperial Records, the label on which Fats Domino recorded. Ahmet could not bear the thought of his brother laboring for a competitor and persuaded him to come back to New York to head Atlantic's jazz division. Within a year, Nesuhi had signed and recorded the Modern Jazz Quartet and jazz bassist Charles Mingus.
Nesuhi also brought Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had written and produced "Smokey Joe's Cafe" and "Riot in Cell Block #9" for the Robins on Spark Records. Although the practice was then unheard of in the industry, Ahmet signed them to work as independent producers. In 1957, after two of the Robins left Spark to form the Coasters on Atlantic, Leiber and Stoller's "Searchin' " and "Young Blood" became a huge two-sided hit for the label.
Having failed to produce a hit with Bobby Darin, and feeling as though his time at Atlantic had come to an end, Herb Abramson left the company in 1958. Cash-poor, Ahmet and Wexler managed to raise enough money to buy out Vahdi Sabit. In return for his $10,000 investment in Atlantic, he received between $2.5 million and $3 million, quit dentistry and moved to the South of France. Ahmet and Jerry also bought out Miriam Abramson, thereby making themselves and Nesuhi the sole owners of Atlantic Records.
When Ahmet learned that Bobby Darin was thinking about leaving the label, he took him into the studio in May 1958 and cut "Splish Splash" and "Queen of the Hop," both of which became big hits because Ahmet wanted Darin to aim his music squarely at the kids who watched American Bandstand on TV each day. Ahmet's great success with Darin led him to Los Angeles, where he began looking for lucrative pop acts. Concerning the early years at Atlantic, Wexler would later write, "We weren't looking for canonization; we lusted for hits. Hits were the cash flow, the lifeblood, the heavenly ichor - the wherewithal of survival." Nonetheless, he found it hard to adjust to the company's new direction. "As Ahmet grew older," Wexler wrote, "he grew less judgmental and more interested in a wide range of commercial forms, especially white rock & roll. I stayed with what I knew and loved."
With money now flowing into the Atlantic coffers, Ahmet was once again living the kind of life he had first learned to love while growing up, with "chauffeured cars, servants, cooks and per diem" in embassies all over the world. In a striking photograph from that era, Ahmet, resplendent in a dark suit with a white silk tie and matching pocket square, can be seen doing some sort of dance step with a gorgeous fashion model named Rosalie Calvert. Both hold drinks in their hands.
During this period, Ahmet hit upon the idea of hiring a bus, which he equipped with a bar so he and all his friends could drink as they went from club to club together. On the rare occasions when Ahmet found himself alone at the end of an evening, he would say, "Let's go home," and the driver would take him to the very stylish El Morocco (known as "Elmer's" to its regulars) on 54th Street for more drinks and more fun.
