After cutting the classic "What'd I Say" in 1959, Ray Charles chose to leave Atlantic without giving Ahmet and Jerry a chance to match the offer that ABC-Paramount had made him. Although Ahmet was personally devastated by the loss of someone he considered a friend, he would later note that the relationship between a label and an artist was like a marriage. At the start, there was always a great deal of excitement. Eventually, the artist found someone richer or the label found someone younger. Although Wexler feared the company might not survive, Ahmet said, "Somehow, I wasn't that concerned. I always figured that we were going to make another hit.... New artists somehow magically appear."

In the world in which Ahmet Ertegun now lived, the change in sensibility that marked the beginning of the Sixties can best be understood by the fact that the fabled El Morocco was suddenly dead and the place to see and be seen was the Peppermint Lounge, an impossibly crowded dance club on 54th Street, where Ahmet could often be found doing the twist alongside the duke of Marlborough, Jackie Kennedy and Truman Capote.


One night, some friends brought Ahmet to dinner with a woman named Ioana Maria Banu. Called Mica by all who know her, she was, in Ahmet's words, "a natural aristocrat." Born in Romania to a family of wealthy landowners, Mica had been forced to flee the country after the communist takeover in 1947. With her husband, an older man who had worked for the royal household, she moved to Canada, where for eight years they ran a chicken farm. Although Mica was still married when she met Ahmet, and he had only recently separated from his first wife, the attraction between them was immediate and intense. Ahmet pursued Mica as only he could. During the time they were courting, he once hid a five-piece band that played "Puttin' on the Ritz" in the bathroom of her suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal. The two were married on April 6th, 1961.

In a nation reinvigorated by President John F. Kennedy's promise of a "New Frontier," civil rights became the predominant issue. "Soul lyrics, soul music," Ahmet would later say, "came at about the same time as the civil rights movement, and it's very possible that one influenced the other." In partnership with Stax/Volt, Atlantic began releasing music recorded by Tom Dowd and Jerry Wexler in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In 1962, Atlantic released "These Arms of Mine," the first hit single by Otis Redding, who, as Ahmet would later recall, "used to call me 'Omelette,' but not as a nickname - he thought at first that this actually was my name." During this era, Atlantic had big hits by the Mar-Keys, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, Percy Sledge, and Joe Tex. In 1967, Wexler took Aretha Franklin into a studio in Muscle Shoals to record "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)." While his partner was turning out the greatest soul music ever recorded, Ahmet continued to pursue white rock acts for the label.

Ahmet had first met Sonny Bono through Phil Spector, who had come and gone at Atlantic without producing any major hits. Bono had actually worked as Ahmet's assistant on recording sessions for the Righteous Brothers, the progenitors of "blue-eyed soul." When Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, then managing Sonny and Cher, called to say the pair was not happy at Warner Bros., Ahmet signed them to Atco. In 1965, "I Got You Babe" was, as Ahmet would later recall, "a nationwide hit and an international hit - I mean, like nothing we had ever experienced before."

Greene and Stone then contacted Wexler about another band they had found in Los Angeles. Wexler, who hated dealing with the new breed of stoned-out, longhaired, hippie musicians whom he called "the rockoids," turned the project over to Ahmet. The band was Buffalo Springfield, and Ahmet was knocked over by the demo of Neil Young's "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong." Sitting down on the floor in Los Angeles with Young, Stephen Stills, Richie Furay, Dewey Martin and Bruce Palmer, Ahmet pitched them on going with a record company that would understand their music. "I think they liked the fact that I sat down on the floor," Ahmet would later tell Young biographer Jimmy McDonough. "When I like an artist, I treat them like a star, and to me these guys were exceptional stars. I thought they were going to be a revolutionary kind of group. It was fantastic to have three great guitar players who were also three outstanding lead singers." Or, as Young would tell the audience as he was being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, "When Ahmet walked into the room, you got good."

Much to Ahmet's dismay, Buffalo Springfield broke up after making only two albums. "I think it was one of the few times I cried," Ahmet told McDonough, "because I just thought that I had the historic group."

Ahmet, who had been blessed with supreme self-confidence, never worried about failure. The same could not be said about Wexler, who worried about everything, most especially the future of Atlantic Records. By 1967, Vee-Jay had collapsed, and Chess was failing. Wexler told Ahmet and Nesuhi that he wanted to sell Atlantic Records to the highest bidder. When Nesuhi sided with Wexler, Ahmet had no choice but to comply. Atlantic Records was sold in October 1967 to Warner-Seven Arts for $17.5 million, split among Ahmet, Nesuhi and Wexler.

"I didn't want to sell the company," Ahmet would later say. "The company was my idea, it was my brainchild, and we were doing well. I saw no reason to think that disaster was imminent. However, they were so insistent on selling, I really didn't have an option." In retrospect, with the value of Atlantic Records today estimated between $2 billion and $4 billion, the deal has come to be viewed as somewhat of a catastrophe. Yet Ahmet himself never blamed Wexler for urging him to do it, saying, "I'm thankful for what I've got. I've lived very well all my life, even when I had no money, and there's very little I can't afford."

In 1969, Warner-Seven Arts was acquired by Kinney National Service, a conglomerate of parking lots, funeral parlors and rental cars, whose chairman, Steve Ross, knew virtually nothing about music. Ahmet announced that he, Nesuhi and Wexler would leave the company once their contracts expired. Faced with the loss of Atlantic's entire management team, Ross took Ahmet to dinner at 21 in New York along with Warner CEO Ted Ashley. When Ross promised he would give Ahmet anything he wanted without interfering in the day-to-day operations at Atlantic, Ahmet negotiated a new deal for himself, Nesuhi and Wexler. Ross would later claim this was one of the luckiest days of his life.

With the era of the small independent label now officially over, rock & roll was big business. Because Ahmet Ertegun was smart enough to understand he would need corporate money to compete in this new industry, he was able to seduce and then sign the world's greatest rock & roll band.

In 1970, the Rolling Stones' onerous long-term deal with Decca finally expired. Intent on landing the band, Ahmet flew to Los Angeles to meet with Mick Jagger at the Whisky a Go Go, where Chuck Berry was performing. Before he got there, Ahmet dined with radio programmer Bill Drake, who challenged him to a drinking contest. Both men chugged several bourbons and then enjoyed a dinner that included some expensive wine and more bourbon. Already jet-lagged, Ahmet dragged himself into the Whisky. When Mick arrived, they drank several toasts. As Mick brought up the Stones' new recording contract, Ahmet's head sagged forward and he fell asleep at the table. "I couldn't keep my eyes open," he told Vanity Fair in 1998. "Mick thought it was very funny."

While Mick may have been charmed, the deal was far from closed. In London, Ahmet phoned Jagger to say it was time to sit down and make a deal. Mick replied he would be more than happy to do just that after he spoke to Clive Davis at Columbia. Stunned, Ahmet hung up the phone. As he would later recall, "Whenever I saw Mick with someone else, my heart sank. It was a painful, ecstatic courtship." Picking the phone back up, Ahmet called Jagger and said that while he completely understood his talking to Clive, he could only sign one major act this year and unless he got an answer in a hurry, it was going to be Paul Revere and the Raiders. Then he hung up. For the next forty-five minutes, the phone rang constantly. Ahmet never picked it up. Not long after, the Rolling Stones joined Atlantic.

Landing the Stones confirmed that Atlantic was now the pre-eminent record label in America. Ahmet was so close to Jagger that he had advised him to drop Marianne Faithfull as his girlfriend, warning that her overwhelming drug habit could ruin everything for them both. Shortly after, Mick married the lovely Bianca Perez Morena de Macias in St. Tropez, France. Nor was Ahmet shy about offering musical advice to the Stones. Andy Johns, then twenty years old, was sitting at the board at Olympic Studios in London, having some trouble mixing "Bitch" for Sticky Fingers, when Ahmet sat down in the control room. "Hey, kid!" Ertegun said to Johns, who had no idea who he was. "What you oughta do is add a little bottom to the guitars and turn the bass up." Johns did as he was told and, as he says, "Bingo! The thing jelled." After Ertegun left, Johns turned to Keith Richards and said, "Who the f*** was that?" Keith said, "You don't know who that is? That's Ahmet Er-te-gun! And he's been making hit records since before you were born."

Ahmet trumped everything he had already done for the Stones by throwing them a party on the roof of New York's St. Regis Hotel to celebrate the end of their triumphant 1972 tour of America. The guest list included Tennessee Williams, Bob Dylan, Huntington Hartford, Oscar and Françoise de la Renta, and a host of titled nobles, with entertainment by Count Basie and Muddy Waters. Culturally, it was a major step in crossing over what had formerly been outlaw music into the mainstream.

On May 3rd, 1975, Jerry Wexler, feeling as though he was no longer involved in decision making at the label, wrote a letter to Ahmet in which he stated, "Under no circumstances, Ahmet, can I be your employee. That's the bottom line." Although Ahmet protested, "Man, you can't quit. It's unthinkable," the greatest team in the history of the record business split after twenty-two incredible years. In 1978, Wexler complained to New Yorker writer George W.S. Trow that he never saw his old pal anymore, stating, "Ahmet sees only two kinds of people - social people and morons. And I ain't either one." Nonetheless, when Wexler wrote his autobiography, Rhythm and the Blues, in 1993, he dedicated the book to Ahmet Ertegun.

In 1983, after being approached with the idea of doing a television show called "The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame," Ahmet contacted Rolling Stone founder and editor Jann Wenner, Jerry Wexler, record executives Bob Krasnow and Seymour Stein, and music-business lawyer Allen Grubman with the idea of actually establishing an institution to honor the greatest artists, producers and record executives in the field. Going from city to city, they heard a variety of presentations before deciding on Cleveland as the physical home for the building, which Ahmet insisted be designed by famed architect I.M. Pei. The first Hall of Fame class - which included Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown and Chuck Berry - was inducted in 1986; the museum opened nine years later. "Ahmet was the guiding moral aesthetic sensibility and consciousness of this thing," recalls Wenner. "In the end, it was always, 'What does Ahmet think?' because Ahmet had the vision. Everyone deferred to Ahmet's taste, his judgment, his knowledge. I don't think he consciously thought this through, but he was building an institution to something that he had built. And really memorializing the history of an art form which in great part was his doing." Ahmet Ertegun himself was inducted into the Hall in 1987. The main exhibition space at the museum bears his name.

In 1988, Atlantic Records celebrated its fortieth anniversary with a gala concert at Madison Square Garden, presenting a marathon twelve-hour show that featured, among many others, a Led Zeppelin reunion, Yes, the Coasters and the Bee Gees. Shortly before the show, Atlantic finally came to terms with Ruth Brown, who had waged a long, protracted and very public campaign on behalf of herself and other artists who had been on the label's early roster. Atlantic agreed to waive all unrecouped costs charged to their royalty accounts and to pay twenty years of back royalties. Atlantic also agreed to begin limited audits on behalf of twenty-eight additional pioneer artists and contributed nearly $2 million to fund the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, which then pressured other labels to bring about royalty reform and gave money to needy musicians. Of all the companies and record men who had been in business back then, only Ahmet and Atlantic were still around.

At an age when most of the others with whom he'd started in the record business had long since retired, Ahmet was still putting out hits by artists such as Debbie Gibson, Twisted Sister, AC/DC, Rush and Skid Row. When Phil Collins, whom Ahmet considered one of the most impressive artists he'd ever known, played "In the Air Tonight" for him for the first time, Ahmet told Collins that if he wanted it to be a single, he would have to put extra drums on it.

"Labels and artists are never going to get along, because they think we're brats, and we think they just haven't smoked enough," Tori Amos, another artist Ahmet championed when he was already old enough to be her grandfather, told Vanity Fair. "But with Ahmet you know he's smoked more than you ever did." She noted that although Ahmet was then seventy-four years old, she could not keep up with him on the dance floor. In 1997, the Atlantic Group, consisting of Atlantic, Rhino and Curb Records, was the number-one label in America, with annual global sales rising to $750 million.

Ahmet began cutting back on his daily corporate duties in 1996. In 1997, he suffered a serious bout of pneumonia. As the result of a shattered pelvis and three separate hip operations, he walked with a cane. Always on the go, he continued to live in unsurpassed style. He and Mica shared a townhouse on 81st Street in Manhattan, an apartment in Paris, a country home in Southampton, New York - with a living room he had demanded be enlarged so that there would be room for an orchestra - and a retreat in Bodrum, Turkey, built with ancient stones from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. His homes were filled with works by Matisse, Magritte, Hockney and Picasso.

In 2001, at the age of seventy-seven, Ahmet produced a session by saxophonist James Carter in Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, a club so small that a mobile recording studio had to be set up outside. Although it was 110 degrees inside the club, Ahmet, clad in a long wool sport coat, a crisp white shirt without a tie and pressed light tan pants, looked as cool as a cucumber as he ran back and forth from the mobile unit to the stage. Calling the songs, asking players to sit out for a number, telling Aretha Franklin to sing the blues on this one, Ahmet ran the session just as he had done for more than fifty years. The next day, he hosted a lunch for the singer Anita Baker, Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson. That night, Ahmet went right back to the club and did it all over again.

Unlike so many who made it big in the music business only to cash out by selling the companies they had infused with their own lifeblood, Ahmet held fast to the tiller. Until the end of his life, he was still in charge of what he had built from the ground up. That he died after falling backstage at a show by a band whom he truly loved is an ending too perfect for any self-respecting Hollywood screenwriter to have written. A year before he died, Ahmet told an interviewer how he'd like to be remembered: "I did a little bit to raise the dignity and recognition of the greatness of African-American music."

Although the music business that Ahmet helped create has completely changed, its success still comes down to the quality of a song that people want to hear again so badly that they will happily pay for the privilege. Better than anyone, Ahmet Ertegun understood that need, having experienced it himself from the time he was a child.

And while the fabulous manner in which he chose to live caused all those with whom he came into contact to love him madly, the real reason Ahmet will be remembered is because by dedicating his life to rhythm and blues, rock and roll, jump and swing, and every form of jazz, from Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner and Ray Charles to the Drifters and Bobby Darin to Buffalo Springfield, Cream, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Phil Collins, Tori Amos, Kid Rock, and Gnarls Barkley, Ahmet Ertegun gave people all over the world, many of whom still do not know his name, the soundtrack of their lives.

--Rolling Stone issue 1018, January 25, 2007M

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