“Ahmet looked upon Herb Abramson as a brother and the deterioration of that relationship was painful for all of us.”
—Jerry Wexler
On April 25, 1955, News from Atlantic, the label’s weekly press handout, happily announced the long awaited return of the company’s president and cofounder. Beneath a headline reading, “Herb’s Back: Prexy Herb Abramson Returns to Atlantic After GI Stint,” the release noted that after having spent two years overseas “as a dentist in the [sic] Air Force,” during which time he had attained the rank of captain, “Herb Abramson . . . returns to active service in N.Y.C. this week” and “will jump into the a.&r. picture immediately to speed execution of the expansion and improvement plans long contemplated by the organization.”
Since Abramson had left the label, the release noted that Jerry Wexler had joined Atlantic as a vice president and “teamed with v.p.’s Ertegun and Miriam Abramson to continue the company’s success along the original lines.” Atlantic had actively gone into music publishing with Progressive Music, launched a new subsidiary label named Cat, and had most recently added Nesuhi Ertegun to the company “as a v.p. in charge of a new jazz and Album program.”
As “Herb earned his reputation as an ‘idea man,’ ” and Atlantic was “no longer a specialty label” but was now approaching “major status in the general record business . . . Herb’s return signals the beginning of a great new era of expansion with full executive force.” Planning to “open new vistas for Atlantic along electronic lines,” especially in the field of binaural (stereo) recording, Abramson would be devoting “much effort to hi-fi techniques, quality control and general product improvement, with an eye also to the developing tape market.”
Noting Abramson had just been granted a patent “for his invention of the trick-track children’s records, two of which Atlantic issued several years ago” that allowed a phonograph needle to randomly select various tracks so 256 different stories could be told on four 78 RPM sides, the handout concluded by stating, “You can expect plenty of surprises with this Abramson cat around!” In ways no press release could have ever adequately explained, no truer words had ever been written.
Herb Abramson was in fact returning to a company that bore little resemblance to the struggling independent label he had left two years earlier. While he had been gone, Big Joe Turner had hit it big with “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” The Drifters had scored a number one R&B record with “Honey Love,” a song written by Clyde McPhatter and Wexler. Ray Charles had gone to the top of the R&B chart with “I Got a Woman.” The Clovers had cut four Top Ten R&B hits, among them “Lovey Dovey,” which Ahmet had written.
In an essay in Cashbox magazine in 1954 credited to Ahmet and Wexler but most likely written by Wexler, the partners had explained how the blues would have to change to meet the tastes of the label’s new target audience, “the bobby soxers,” who in great numbers were now looking to find their own sound. Having coined the phrase “rhythm and blues,” Wexler borrowed a term being used to describe music popular in the South and the Southwest and decided to call this new form “cat music.” As he explained in the essay, cat music would be “Up-to-date blues with a beat, and infectious catch phrases, and danceable rhythms . . . It has to kick and it has to have a message for the sharp youngsters who dig it.”
While the term never caught on, Wexler did establish a short-lived subsidiary label at Atlantic called Cat on which the Chords recorded “Sh-Boom.” The song went to number two on the Billboard R&B chart and then became the first doo-wop record to enter the Top Ten on the pop chart, rising to number five. Covered by the Crew Cuts on Mercury for a white audience, the song was the number one record for nine weeks in August and September of 1954. In no small part, this was because Tom Dowd was then still regularly being hired by major labels to produce white cover versions of Atlantic’s R&B hits that sounded as much like the original as possible.
Even after Herb Abramson rejoined Atlantic, Ahmet and Wexler continued going out on the road together. Journeying to Memphis to hang out with legendary disc jockey Dewey Phillips while he was on the air at WHBQ, they then accompanied him to the Variety Club, where Elvis Presley happened to be having a beer. The partners had already tried to buy Presley’s contract from Sam Phillips at Sun Records for the astronomical sum of $30,000 only to have Phillips accept RCA’s offer of $40,000 with a $5,000 bonus thrown in to sweeten the deal. If in fact Elvis had accepted their offer, the partners would have been hard pressed to come up with the money.
While Herb Abramson had in fact been very much like a brother to Ahmet before leaving Atlantic, Ahmet’s brother was now at the label as well. Unable to bear the thought of Nesuhi going to work for Lew Chudd at Imperial Records in Los Angeles, Ahmet had told him, “You can’t do that. We’ll make you a partner in Atlantic.” As Abramson would later say, “So, foolish me, I said to Ahmet, ‘Give Nesuhi some of your stock, that doesn’t cost me anything.’ Then boom, what do I know, there is another hostile partner. Ahmet and Nesuhi used to talk in Turkish in my presence to say things I wasn’t supposed to know.” As Wexler would describe it, Ahmet and Nesuhi’s relationship was based on “exasperation and exacerbation.” There were times when he was closer to them than they were to each other “except when it came to the bone, the Turkish nitty-gritty.”
Moving to New York, where he would soon marry for the second time, Nesuhi took over production of Atlantic’s jazz records while also overseeing the label’s entry into the burgeoning market for albums recorded in the long-playing 331/3 format. With an eye for design and packaging second to none, Nesuhi personally approved all the artwork that appeared on the label’s album covers while also signing and/or producing the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Keith Jarrett.
As the noted jazz critic Nat Hentoff would later write, “Nesuhi was the most respected figure in jazz recording among musicians and, indeed, among his competitors. He had—to begin with—unerring taste. With that taste went standards. His love for the music prevented him from lowering his standards. And he had genuine respect for the musicians he signed for the label.”
Unlike Ahmet, who often took control of a recording session in order to come up with a hit, Nesuhi was always a far more supportive presence in the studio. In the words of John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Nesuhi “let us decide what we wanted to play.” Both Mingus and Coltrane trusted him implicitly because “they knew Nesuhi knew how to listen.” Hentoff added, “There was also his abiding curiosity. He was not afraid of being surprised, or even startled, by sounds he had never heard before . . . he became, in essence, one of the musicians. A description he would prize.”
Although Atlantic’s jazz records never sold nearly as much as the hits produced by Ahmet and Wexler, both men recognized the need to keep this form of music alive by giving Nesuhi free rein to sign artists he believed were doing significant work. By making it plain he did not share their feelings about this situation, Herb Abramson further complicated his already difficult reentry at the label. Until he joined Atlantic, Nesuhi had made only what Abramson called “moldy fig” records. “That was a very fine little hobby,” Abramson would later say, “but he wasn’t in the mainstream of the record business.”
Now that both Nesuhi and Wexler were at Atlantic, Abramson no longer had the direct connection to Ahmet that had bound the two men together when they were struggling to get the company off the ground. Nor was Ahmet the same person he had been when Abramson had last worked with him on a daily basis. For the past two years, Ahmet had been in charge at Atlantic and was now far more assured and self-confident than he had been when the partners had worked side by side.
As Miriam Abramson would later say, “When Herb came back from the army in 1955, we were doing pretty well—everybody had cars . . . This whole shift in balance was something he couldn’t adjust to. He couldn’t come back as number one, and he certainly couldn’t come back as number three. He had an ego, because he had started the company and he had experience. So it was rather an awkward situation. I think neither Jerry nor Ahmet felt comfortable working with him. They’d had it with Herb from the minute he came back from Germany. He drove them crazy and he was driven mad by the fact that his place had been usurped.”
In the record business, especially at a label like Atlantic that was now growing by leaps and bounds as the new white teenage market kept expanding, two years was an eternity. Despite all the changes that had occurred at the company while Abramson had been away, he could have still found a way to fit in if the same man who had gone off to serve his country had returned. But by all accounts, Herb Abramson in the spring of 1955 did not resemble the person he had once been. In Wexler’s words, “Herb came back a little bit nutso.” The songwriter Doc Pomus, who had worked with Abramson during Atlantic’s first days at the Hotel Jefferson, called him “an absolutely professional flake” whose behavior grew more erratic by the day. “He fancied himself as a songwriter, and always called me up in the middle of the night to help him write a song. He grew weirder as time went on. Even so, he really was a lovely guy.”
While it was obvious to those who knew Abramson that his personality had undergone a radical transformation during his time in Germany, they could only speculate as to the cause. As his wife Miriam, who had spent three months with her husband while he was stationed overseas and did not find him to be depressed, would later say, “Herb lost the impetus. He was gone and he lost it. His mind was altered. He did a lot of pot.” In the words of Delia Gottlieb, who had first met Abramson more than a decade earlier in Washington, “I think Herb very definitely got into drugs in Germany and came back changed because he had been isolated from what he knew.”
Although Abramson’s third wife, Barbara, said she “never knew Herb to do cocaine,” dentists did then have the legal right to possess and prescribe the substance as a topical anesthetic. “Herb was snorting cocaine,” someone who knew Abramson well during this period would later confirm. “He was a dentist and would write his own prescriptions. He had a guy working for him who would run and get the drugs for him in the studio. It was all cocaine behavior. He must have gotten hooked in Germany.”
Whether it was the loneliness and isolation Abramson felt while spending two years overseas as a military dentist when he really wanted to be making records that caused him to begin using the drug, no one can say for sure. Twenty years before cocaine would become the drug of choice for artists as well as many of the top-ranking executives in the record business, Herb Abramson had come back from Germany with a habit that would have made it difficult for anyone to work with him under any circumstances. Nor did he come home alone.
Herb Abramson brought with him from Germany a woman he wanted to marry. As Wexler would later say, “He came back with a Brunhilde!” Although Abramson had a two-year-old son he barely knew, he went with his German girlfriend to Reno to establish residency for a Nevada divorce, and it was there she became pregnant with his child. The two soon married but, in Miriam Abramson’s words, “She was very unhappy in the United States. She hated it. And she went to group therapy and ran away with somebody else. From group therapy.”
While her husband had been in the army, Miriam had continued to receive his full salary as the president of the label. Now that their marriage was over, new financial arrangements had to be made so they could both continue working at Atlantic. “To this point,” she said, “I’d never had my own salary. I just had his. When we got the divorce, I got no alimony. Herb said if he gave me stock instead of alimony, I would say it was okay for Nesuhi to come in. So Nesuhi and I got stock at about the same time.”
With his former wife running day-to-day operations at the label, and Ahmet, Wexler, and Nesuhi doing business together in one office, Abramson set up shop in another office with a conference room between them. What must have been a fairly intolerable situation for all concerned lasted a few tense months until Ahmet and Wexler decided Abramson should have his own subsidiary label at Atlantic, to be known as Atco (shorthand for the Atlantic Corporation), thereby giving him the chance, as Charlie Gillett would later write, “to prove that he had not lost his touch, that Ahmet was mistaken if he thought Jerry Wexler was any kind of substitute as a producer.”
The partners also set up Atco because, as Wexler explained, “It behooved us to create another label, another logo, that could be handled by distributors other than the ones we had to give us more outlets for our product. It was a way to diversify.” While Herb Abramson was now back at the label, the writing on the wall was plain for everyone to see. It was just a matter of time until he would be gone for good.
By 1957, a year in which the partners at Atlantic were forced to reduce their weekly salaries despite releasing hits by the Coasters, Chuck Willis, Clyde McPhatter, and the Bobbettes, Ahmet had shifted into full playboy mode and could be found out on the town night after night enjoying life to the fullest. Not yet the A-list celebrity he would eventually become, his divorce from Jan Holm was noted only in the somewhat lowly New York Journal-American by gossip columnist Louis Sobol, who on November 20, 1957, wrote, “The Ahmet Ertigons [sic] (he heads a record firm) have parted. His pop was once Turkish Ambassador to the US.”
Still somewhat insecure about his own appearance, Ahmet had experienced a personal breakthrough in his dating life after being told that even the most beautiful models in New York were like teenage girls who liked to go out at night so they could be seen in the most fashionable places. Armed with this bit of invaluable information, he began keeping company with a succession of well-known models on a regular basis. The very sleek, racy-looking 1955 Aston Martin DB2/4 coupe Ahmet was now driving around Manhattan also did nothing to hurt his cause.
While Ahmet’s former wife had been a model, she had never attained the lofty status of Pat Jones, who, in Miriam Abramson’s words, was “the muse for James Galanos, the famous California designer. They used to have dancing in the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel and when she and Ahmet would come in together, the band would play ‘Have You Met Miss Jones?’ ” After Pat Jones introduced Ahmet to her friend Betsy Pickering, a former Sarah Lawrence student whom Time magazine described as one of “the cool all-American beauties . . . of the 50’s,” Ahmet began dating her as well.
A stunning dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty who looked somewhat like Audrey Hepburn and had already appeared on the cover of Vogue, Pickering sent Ahmet a postcard from Paris while waiting to be photographed in a Dior gown at the Château de Malmaison to say how hard she had been working and how much she missed him. Confessing she was not having much of a social life because she had been working so hard, Pickering ended her note by sending him her love.
As Ahmet would later describe this period, “The girls I was going out with included some sub-deb types or post-deb types who were very American, some bohemian girls who were Village intellectuals, and many girls like Pat Jones, who was the number one model in California in those days, and Betsy Pickering, who I was living with at that time. These girls were very fun, charming, and amusing people and in some cases very good-hearted and in some cases very bitchy.”
Ahmet’s boon companion during this period was Julio Mario Santo Domingo. Born into a very wealthy Colombian family, Santo Domingo had first met Ahmet in Washington while he was attending Georgetown and Ahmet was at St. John’s. A good friend of future Nobel Prize–winning author Gabriel García Márquez, Santo Domingo would become the chairman of Avianca Airlines while amassing a personal fortune of $4 billion through his control of more than one hundred companies.
The two men shared an unrelenting love of the good times they always had when they were together, most often in New York. As Santo Domingo would later say, “Ahmet and I did not see each other in the daytime. Daytime was for sleeping. We used to go to El Morocco practically every night.” Spectacularly politically incorrect long before the term was invented, Ahmet once went to greet his good friend at La Guardia Airport with a sign that read, “Welcome home, spic.”
“In those days,” Ahmet recalled, “when I don’t think I had ten thousand dollars in the bank, the society columns used to refer to me as ‘Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish millionaire.’ ” One reason they did so was that after he had been given too many tickets, Ahmet decided he could no longer drive himself around Manhattan and so traded in his “Aston Martin for a used Rolls-Royce and I got this fellow—his name was Frank—who was an old Irish retired policeman. I think I was paying him like 75 cents an hour. He was always very well dressed with a chauffeur’s cap and had white hair and with a Rolls-Royce, he looked very, very stately. We’d be somewhere and we’d all get in the car and I’d say, ‘Take us home, Frank.’ Which meant El Morocco, which was at 54th Street between Third and Lexington, an elegant club.”
Known to its habitués as “Elmer’s,” El Morocco was then the place to be seen in Manhattan. The first club to use a velvet rope to separate its customers from the hoi polloi, El Morocco was famous for its blue zebra-stripe banquettes, where club photographer Jerome Zerbe regularly snapped photographs of celebrities like Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich consorting with the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the well-known and much married Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa that appeared in New York’s society columns. Not surprisingly, Ahmet took to the place like a duck to water.
In Ahmet’s words, “I made a deal with John Perona, who was the owner of El Morocco that I would always have a check for $12. If I came and had one drink or I had dinner for ten people, I had one check for $12. It was a very small amount because I came there at least three or four times a week and I always came with a good-looking girl and maybe two or three other couples and we knew everybody. It was part of a scene and that made the club.”
To accommodate all the friends he liked having with him at night, Ahmet began renting a bus for $3 an hour that he outfitted with a bar and enough room for a three-piece band. Stocking the bar with champagne, he hired a bartender “and a band of out-of-work immigrant musicians, and rode around town livening up parties.” While visiting Birdland one night, the basement jazz club on 52nd Street owned by Roulette Records founder Morris Levy, Ahmet kidnapped the entire Count Basie band and drove off with them on the bus. “Of course, they missed their next set. Those were very fun, marvelous days. I was a bachelor, loose on the town. I really started to go out with a lot of girls. I didn’t have very much home life.”
Although Ahmet and Herb Abramson no longer traveled in the same social circles, Abramson was also living well in the luxurious San Remo building on Central Park West between 74th and 75th Streets. After having gone to Mexico in February 1957 to finalize his divorce from the woman he had brought back with him from Germany, Abramson began keeping company with Barbara Heaton, a coat and suit model who was attending Hunter College at night. After the two were married at the end of the year, they moved into a duplex with five bathrooms in the equally elegant El Dorado on Central Park West between 90th and 91st Streets.
By 1957, as Abramson himself seems to have clearly understood, music in America had definitely changed. Although Atlantic was doing all it could to sell records to what was now primarily a white teenage market, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, and Buddy Holly were all recording for other labels. No longer at the cutting edge of the business, Atlantic found itself competing with labels whose records were more in tune with the musical tastes of these new consumers.
In a very thoughtful and well-considered essay entitled “Rock ’N’ Roll—Seen in Perspective” in Cash Box magazine on July 28, 1956, Abramson had written, “No future history concerned with the life and times of the 20th Century can leave out Rock ’N’ Roll. It’s that important . . . it is the best dance music there is . . . Like the jazz and blues from which it is derived, good Rock ’N’ Roll is always fresh in improvisation and always swinging with a beat.”
Having accurately assessed this new musical form, Abramson began trying to find an artist who could make the kind of records he had described in his essay. After being told by his partners that he had to choose between a black male baritone singer and a young white kid who sounded black, Abramson decided that what he really needed was an artist who could do for his new label what Elvis Presley had done for RCA. Passing on Brook Benton in the hope he could pick him up later, Abramson signed Bobby Darin to a recording contract at Atco.
As a boy growing up in a working-class Italian American family in the Bronx, Bobby Darin—born Walden Robert Cassotto—had suffered from repeated bouts of rheumatic fever that left his heart so weakened that one doctor thought he would be lucky to live to be sixteen. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Darin attended Hunter College on a scholarship but soon dropped out to pursue a career in music.
After working as a busboy in resort hotels in the Catskill mountains, where he performed as a comedy drummer and singer, Darin began writing songs with fellow Bronx High School of Science student Don Kirshner. In 1956, Darin signed with Decca Records and recorded his own version of “Rock Island Line.” A Lead Belly song that had been a huge skiffle hit for Lonnie Donegan in England, the record went nowhere in America.
A driven and astonishingly talented performer with great personal charm who onstage projected his own version of Frank Sinatra’s ineffable cool, Darin had not yet decided in which musical genre he wanted to make his career. In 1957, Herb Abramson released three singles by Darin on Atco, among them the 1931 standard “(I Found) A Million Dollar Baby.” Spending what his partners at Atlantic considered to be an inordinate amount of money to promote these records, Abramson issued three more Darin sides during the following year. None of them made their way onto the charts.
In a business where the brutal monthly bottom line could be met only by churning out a steady stream of hits, Herb Abramson was now mired in an authentic dry spell. Had he been able to strike gold by coming up with at least one big record, Ahmet would have most certainly found a way to accommodate him at Atlantic. Unfortunately, this did not prove to be the case.
For Ahmet as well as every other record company executive trying to gain entry to the white teenage market, the most powerful sales medium was radio and the most powerful man in radio was Alan Freed. After bringing his “Moondog” show from Cleveland to WINS in New York in September 1954, Freed changed the name of his program to The Rock ’n’ Roll Party and began popularizing the use of this term (which he also tried to copyright) to describe the music he played each night for his dedicated young followers.
Talking nonstop as he introduced records that often became hits simply because he was playing them, Freed would “shout incessantly into his open mike” as he kept time by ringing a cowbell or pounding his hand on a telephone directory. Backed by his business partner Morris Levy, Freed began hosting and promoting what soon became an immensely popular series of live rock ’n’ roll cavalcade shows where the audience was equally divided between blacks and whites. Adding to his considerable income, Freed also managed groups who performed at his shows and whose records he plugged on the radio.
Although Herb Abramson was one of Freed’s good friends, Jerry Wexler was the one who went to a cloakroom in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway on the first Monday of every month to hand either Freed or his representative a paper bag containing $600 in cash. “The baksheesh didn’t guarantee play for any particular record; we were only buying access,” Wexler would later write. “He viewed the Erteguns and me as marks, paying customers.”
When times got hard for the partners at Atlantic, Wexler felt certain Freed would understand their situation and asked the disc jockey if he would agree to play their records for free for a few months. Freed’s succinct reply, which Wexler would later say the deejay sent him in a letter from Cleveland, was, “I’d love to, Wex, but I can’t do it. That’s taking the bread out of my children’s mouths.” Freed then promptly stopped playing Atlantic’s records.
The label had actually been paying Freed far more than $600 a month to play its records on the radio and book its artists on his live shows. To curry favor with him, Ahmet and Wexler had sent a bulldozer to dig the hole for a swimming pool they then paid for at Grey Cliffe, Freed’s sixteen-room stucco mansion on Wallack’s Point not far from where conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. lived in Stamford, Connecticut.
Although Freed would proudly point to the pool as the most expensive feature of his house, he did not respond to this generous gift by playing Atlantic’s latest releases on his show. Interceding on behalf of his good friends at the label, Morris Levy went to the deejay and asked why he was doing this only to have Freed reply that just because Ahmet and Wexler had bought him a pool, they didn’t own him. Telling Levy he would begin featuring Atlantic records on his show as soon as they released something “good enough” for him to play, Freed added that if the partners at Atlantic did not like what he was doing, they could come and fill in the pool.
Despite the friction between them, Ahmet and Wexler attended Freed’s annual end-of-summer record business party at Grey Cliffe on August 26, 1957. Herb Abramson and his future wife, Barbara, were also there as were Morris Levy, Bob Rolontz of RCA, Bob Thiele of Coral, and Sam Clark of ABC-Paramount. As everyone stood around the pool, Abramson went into the house and found a pair of swim trunks. He and Thiele then began, in Barbara Abramson’s words, “doing dives, enjoying themselves, and cooling down so that other people began wishing they had their bathing suits.”
Wearing high heels, a tight red cotton Chinese dress, and “a beautiful $80 golden stole Herb had just bought me,” she suddenly felt Ahmet grab her arm and pull her toward the pool. “No, don’t do that,” she told him. “Herb just bought me this stole and it will get ruined.” Letting go of her arm, Ahmet said, “Oh, I didn’t realize. Here, let me fold it for you.” Taking the stole from her, “he folded it very, very nicely like a real gentleman and put it in the second row of chairs and I thought, ‘This is a very nice person. He doesn’t even want me to get splashed by people in the swimming pool.’ ”
Walking back to her “with this beguiling smile on his face, he grabbed my arm again and threw me in the goddamn pool without even asking me if I could swim.” When Abramson dropped her off at her parents’ apartment that night, she “was missing one shoe, all the curl was washed out of my hair, my makeup was washed off, and the dress was all wrinkled and that was when my father said to Herb at two A.M., ‘What are your intentions regarding my daughter?’ ” A week later, Abramson presented her with an engagement ring.
While the sight of Herb Abramson’s good-looking new girlfriend standing beside a pool for which Atlantic had paid may have just seemed like too good an opportunity for an inveterate practical joker like Ahmet to ignore, he would never have contemplated pulling such a stunt with Herb’s former wife Miriam. By acting like what Barbara Abramson would later call one of “the boys down at the public swimming pool at 59th Street tossing the girls in to get wet as part of rough horseplay,” Ahmet had clearly demonstrated how he now felt about his longtime partner. As he would soon prove, Ahmet’s patience with Herb Abramson’s role as the president of a label he was no longer actually running was nearing an end.
On February 11, 1958, Paul G. Marshall of the law firm Marshall & Ziffer sent the “Principals of Atlantic Recording Co.” a memo in which he discussed overtures made by Max Youngstein of United Artists to purchase Atlantic Records with negotiations to “take place around a central figure of two million, five hundred thousand dollars but actually would be based on a formula of five times net before taxes or four times net before taxes, officers’ salaries.” As Marshall also noted, “Mr. Youngstein asked which of the personnel would come along in the deal. I refrained from comment and he ventured the opinion based on what he had been told, a minimum of three principals must come with the deal. Namely, Ahmet, Jerry, and Nesuhi.”
Then just twenty-five years old, Paul Marshall would over the course of his long legal career sell the music and movie rights to the Woodstock Festival while also representing a list of clients that included the Beatles, Akira Kurosawa, David Frost, Jacques Brel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Suge Knight. As he would later say, “I am the ancient history of the music business. Someone once asked me who was my first client. And I said, ‘Mozart.’ ”
In Marshall’s words, “Max Youngstein came to me. United Artists was then just a film company that was going into the record business and they had two choices. They could either start up or buy. The reason Herb was not mentioned in the memo was very simple. Herb was in trouble in the industry and people knew it. In my first meeting with Jerry Wexler, he mentioned that Herb was not coming along if the company was sold.”
Beginning a pattern that would continue throughout his years at Atlantic, Wexler was eager to make the deal. “Herb always told me,” Barbara Abramson would later say, “that Jerry used the oft-quoted phrase, ‘This is just a horse race. It can stop anyday now.’ So Jerry felt, ‘Cash in while it’s good. And get the money.’ ” In Marshall’s words, “Jerry was a very sound man who I really loved but he was always interested in selling. Always, always. He wanted to put money away. He hadn’t come from wealth and he was not financially secure and he had a wife and kid and the record business then was a fly-by-night business.”
Although “the United Artists offer didn’t proceed much further,” Ahmet and Wexler used it as the impetus to change the long-standing corporate structure at Atlantic. “Herb didn’t particularly want to sell,” Barbara Abramson would later recall, “and Ahmet came to him and said, ‘We want to have another election because it won’t look good for a sale if in all these years, we’ve never had an election of a different set of officers.’ I said to Herb, ‘How do you feel about that?’ And he said, ‘I don’t like it at all. It’s like a gang-up.’ ”
Having already given his former wife Miriam more than half of his original 30 percent share of Atlantic, Abramson knew the vote would go against him. “It was a cabal because they were also trying to freeze Miriam out,” Barbara Abramson recalled. “Herb spoke to me about it a number of times and said, ‘I should have told them, “Okay, you want to be president? I’ll be chairman of the board.” ’ But obviously they wouldn’t have liked that either.”
“Let me tell you the key to everything,” Wexler later said. “While Herb was gone, he got everything we got. Salary, cash, whatever it was, he got. When he came back, we gave him Atco to run but he started to act kind of eccentric and crazy. So Ahmet and I got together and said, ‘We’re going to have to do something about this.’ We decided to make Ahmet president and reduce Herb to executive vice president. When we called Herb in and told him that, he walked out and said, ‘See my lawyers.’ He could have stayed forever. We were not the kind of people that would get rid of breathing bodies, warm human beings.” In Ahmet’s words, “Herb insisted on being bought out. He didn’t have to go.”
More than thirty years later, Abramson would admit, “I had a big ego and after a while I couldn’t take it, so I said, ‘Buy me out.’ It was the stupidest thing I ever said, but that was it. In entertainment entities there is cutthroat politics, but it is the way of the world.” After Abramson stalked out of the meeting at Atlantic, the partners began protracted deliberations with him during which, as Ahmet later said, “Herb tried to blackmail us to get the price up. He threatened us. So anyway, we paid him off and got him out. And I said, ‘Well, good riddance.’ We didn’t part as friends.”
Although Wexler would later write that like all independent record labels, Atlantic was then cash poor, the partners managed to raise $300,000 to buy out Abramson. Using what would be today’s equivalent of about $2.4 million, Herb Abramson then founded the Triumph, Blaze, and Festival record labels, none of which was particularly successful. He produced “High Heel Sneakers,” a hit for Tommy Tucker on Chess Records, and cowrote “Long Tall Shorty” with Don Covay.
Moving with his wife and young daughter to the fashionable Belnord apartment building at 225 West 86th Street, Abramson built and ran the A-1 recording studio, which was originally located in Atlantic’s former offices at 234 West 56th Street before moving to the ground floor of a hotel at Broadway and 72nd Street. Shortly after leaving Atlantic, Abramson also sold his “trick-track record” patent to the Mattel Corporation for use in its very popular “Chatty Cathy” doll, which uttered a variety of recorded phrases through the use of a pull string.
As Herb Abramson got older, his kidneys began to fail. Insisting this “was not for publication,” Ahmet would tell an interviewer that after Abramson had “lost all his money, I put him on a salary that nobody knew about. I guess I had him for the last twenty years of his life.” One week before his eighty-third birthday on November 9, 1999, Herb Abramson died of kidney failure. Through Atlantic Records, Ahmet paid for his cremation.
In time, Abramson’s decision to sell his interest in Atlantic before the company began generating huge profits came to be viewed in the record business as a mistake of historic proportions. Abramson himself seems to have dealt with it with a kind of equanimity shared by few others in an industry he had helped create. As he would later say, “I sometimes look at it like a poker game, in that originally there are quite a few participants, but some of them are dealt out, and some of them end up with all the chips. That is the way the cookie crumbles.”
In a letter of condolence he sent to Barbara Abramson shortly after her husband’s death, Jerry Wexler wrote, “Herb was a wonderful man. Not only for his talent and role as a pioneer in recorded music but for the fine character and inherent decency that was so basic to his nature. Life had not always been kind to him and although we rarely communicated through the years, I sensed that he never let misfortune embitter him or turn him against others.”
Wexler concluded his letter by writing, “He welcomed me into the firm and as he said goodbye to us for his tour of Army duty, he left me with this counsel. ‘No matter what, don’t ever stop making records.’ Simplistic on the face of it but it turned out to be the most important single rule to go by through all the vicissitudes of a very tough occupation.”
At Atlantic Records, Ahmet, Wexler, and Nesuhi were now in control. Within a matter of weeks after Herb Abramson had walked out of their offices for the final time, Ahmet came up with the huge hit that finally crossed the label over into the white teenage market it had been pursuing for so long.