“Splish splash/I was takin’ a bath/Long about a Saturday night.”
—Bobby Darin, Murray Kaufman, and Jean Murray
As he sat in the bleachers surrounded by teenagers in a television studio at WFIL in Philadelphia with a microphone in his hand, a very youthful-looking and impossibly handsome Dick Clark leaned into the camera to introduce an artist he was proud to say was also a personal friend. After telling Clark he had no idea what was happening across the country because everywhere he went throughout the land, people were saying the best show on television was Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, Bobby Darin said he was about to introduce a new song he thought could be pretty big.
Moving off to where performers like Frankie Avalon, Connie Francis, and Dion and the Belmonts lip-synched their latest releases on the show teenagers all over America rushed home from school each day to watch, Darin began snapping his fingers and rolling his shoulders to the infectious beat of “Splish Splash.” Due in no small part to the exposure Dick Clark gave the song on Bandstand as well as his wildly popular Saturday night show on ABC, the record became a million-seller and rose to the top of the R&B charts.
With the possible exception of Jerry Blavat, who in time would become a fast-talking radio disc jockey known as “The Geater with the Heater” and “The Big Boss with the Hot Sauce,” none of the teenagers who danced regularly on Bandstand and so had themselves become pop stars, had ever heard of Ahmet Ertegun. Nor would they have understood how a man twice their age could have known that a song with nursery rhyme lyrics and a rocking beat would allow Atlantic Records to finally tap into the brand-new market American Bandstand as well as a slew of locally televised teenage dance shows had created.
With Alan Freed’s own nationally televised Big Beat show having been canceled when ABC affiliates in the South became outraged by the sight of singer Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl as the show’s closing credits rolled, Dick Clark had become the man who could make or break a record in America. In small towns all over the country, teenagers would vanish from the streets as soon as American Bandstand came on at three, not to be seen again until the program ended at four-thirty.
While AM radio remained the mainstay for teenagers who listened to rock ’n’ roll, they could now for the first time sit in their parents’ living rooms and actually watch performers whom they had only ever heard before. The new medium was ideally suited for an artist like Bobby Darin, who with his good looks and brash, self-assured stage presence could sell a song like no one but Elvis.
Although Herb Abramson had recognized Darin’s talent by signing him to Atco, he had never known what to do with him in the studio and actually delayed a session at which Darin wanted to record “Splish Splash” until the artist came up with “better material.” Darin had written the song in disc jockey Murray “The K” Kaufman’s New York apartment while they were “shooting the shit one night” and “talking about writing songs.” Opening his “big mouth,” Darin boasted he could write a song “off any idea: give me an idea and you got a song. So Murray says, ‘Okay, wise guy. Write me a song that has “splish splash I was takin’ a bath” as one of the lines.’ I went right to his piano and did it.” In truth, Kaufman’s mother, Jean Murray, had suggested the line to him over the phone and she then collaborated with Darin and Kaufman on the music.
Had it not been for the ongoing tension between the partners at Atlantic, Darin might never have recorded what became his breakthrough hit. In Ahmet’s words, “Bobby Darin used to come see Herb, and Herb would keep him waiting, sometimes an hour before he could see him. He didn’t care. The records weren’t selling . . . Herb was keeping him waiting and he would be in the waiting room next to my office where there was a piano and he would sit and play . . . I thought, ‘My God, this kid is terrific.’ ”
When Ahmet learned Darin’s one-year contract with Atco was about to expire and Abramson intended to release him, he decided to produce the artist on his own. Although by now Ahmet was no longer doing much actual recording, he took Darin into the Atlantic office at 234 West 56th on April 10, 1958, for a split session with jazz singer Morgana King, whom he had just signed to Atlantic. “Can you imagine?” Jerry Wexler recalled, “the disparity between a Morgana King and a Bobby Darin? In a single session?”
Realizing Darin had been “creating a completely different kind of music,” Ahmet decided “he needed a much funkier backing than he had been getting” and put together “a little rhythm section” of good R&B players Darin knew and liked. Together, they selected the sides Darin would cut in his hour and a half of studio time. Ahmet also insisted Darin play piano on the session “because that was one of the things that got me about him—the basic rhythm that he put into his songs.”
With Tom Dowd at the board of the brand-new eight-track Ampex 300 recording console he had persuaded the partners at Atlantic to let him buy for $11,000 and Ahmet instructing drummer Panama Francis to lay back on the “eights” he was playing on his cymbals, Darin did seven takes of the song before they had it down. “When I cut the record,” Ahmet would later say, “I thought it was going to the top. It was a cute novelty lyric, and everybody dug it. Without the lyric, it would have been a hit because of the music and the track. It was just there.”
Confirming that Ahmet was already light-years ahead of his partners when it came to understanding the kind of records kids who watched American Bandstand would buy, Wexler said, “I thought ‘Splish Splash’ was an abominable piece of shit, but Ahmet saw it and that was why he did it and that was the beginning of Bobby Darin.”
During the same session, Darin cut “Queen of the Hop,” which also became a Top Ten hit. Earlier in the day, Ahmet had learned that Chuck Willis, who in 1957 had cut “C.C. Rider” for Atlantic, thereby inspiring the Stroll dance craze, had died on an operating table in Atlanta, Georgia, at the age of thirty. “It was our first experience of a great artist being taken away from us, suddenly out of the blue,” Ahmet would later say. “It was a terrible tragedy and a devastating shock to all of us.” Despite the bad news, Ahmet managed to produce two hits for Darin in that day.
In the mistaken belief he was still going to be cut loose from his Atco contract, Darin went into Decca’s New York studio two weeks later and cut “Early in the Morning,” a song that bore a great resemblance to Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman.” When Decca learned Darin had re-signed with Atco, the company credited the song to “The Ding Dongs” and released it on its Brunswick label eight days after “Splish Splash” hit the stores.
“Bobby Darin snuck off with Murray the K and they went out and cut a record and then gave it to Decca under another name,” Paul Marshall, who was then handling Atlantic’s legal affairs, recalled. “Darin was called in with his lawyer and his manager and we had this meeting with Ahmet and Jerry. I pointed out he was a young man with a great start to a career and the last thing he needed was people like me on his case to stop this record and what would he get from it? Murray the K would have made some money but not him. I said, ‘You just made a terrible mistake. Because I’m going to beat you.’ ”
After Darin had signed a statement retracting Decca’s right to release the record, Marshall called Murray the K, who “took a very harsh line and had a chip on his shoulder.” Walking over to the phone on Ahmet’s desk, Marshall picked it up and said, “Get me the manager for WINS.” Suddenly nervous, Murray the K demanded to know why Marshall was calling his radio station. “Murray,” Marshall told him, “if we’re going to sue somebody who plays our records, it’s wise for us to warn them that we’re going to do it.”
Faced with a lawsuit Decca knew it could not win, the label surrendered the masters to Atco but then rushed Buddy Holly into the studio to record his own version of the song, which they then released before Atco could issue the original verson credited to Bobby Darin and the Rinky Dinks. Both versions became minor hits, with the original rising slightly higher on the charts than the cover. “I wish somebody could catch the glamour and glory of the fifties,” Marshall would later say. “Those days were so much fun. The majors lost control. Rock ’n’ roll came and they didn’t believe in it and all these guys came out of the woods and a lot of them were characters. There were no MBAs. Just people who loved records.”
Six months after “Splish Splash” had made Bobby Darin a star, Ahmet was having lunch with his friend the well-known Austrian singer and actress Lotte Lenya who as Jenny Diver in the 1928 stage version of her husband, Kurt Weill’s, The Threepenny Opera had introduced the song “Mack the Knife,” with lyrics written by Bertolt Brecht. At some point, she asked Ahmet why he had never made a recording of any of her husband’s songs. Ahmet told her he didn’t make that kind of record at his company but when she asked him to promise he would try, Ahmet said, “Well, maybe we will.”
A few days later, Darin came to see Ahmet with the version of “Mack the Knife” Louis Armstrong had cut in 1956. “I know this sounds pretty weird,” Darin said, “but I think I could make a great version of this—I should do it.” Then twenty-three years old, Darin loved big band arrangements and songs that were standards. After seeing The Threepenny Opera in Greenwich Village, Darin had begun performing “Mack the Knife” on tour.
When Darin told Ahmet he wanted to cut the song so he could be more than “a teen idol,” Ahmet’s initial response was, “What are you talking about? You’ll ruin your career.” Nor was he alone in this opinion. Dick Clark told Darin he was crazy to want to record “Mack the Knife” and “he was going to die with the song.” Still owed royalties for “Splish Splash,” Darin told Ahmet he was willing to roll the money over and pay for the session at his own expense. Backed by a full orchestra conducted by Richard Weiss and with Ahmet, Nesuhi, and Wexler producing, Darin cut the song in December 1958.
“As we were cutting ‘Mack the Knife,’ ” Ahmet recalled, “everybody knew that this was going to be a number one record. Then I realized that having done the rock thing, Bobby was now going to have a big pop hit. He was going to be a major, major star . . . But we knew as we were cutting it. We were jumping up and down. After the first take, I said, ‘You’ve got it. That’s it.’ ”
Despite Ahmet’s enthusiastic reaction during the session, it was not until “Dream Lover,” a record Ahmet and Wexler also produced, had gone to number two in the pop charts and Darin’s manager had urged Ahmet to put out “Mack the Knife” as a single that the song was finally released in August 1959. Darin’s jumping, swinging version of the song, in which he improvised Lotte Lenya’s name into two different verses, went to number one three months later and stayed there for nine weeks. The only number one hit Darin would have in his career, the record remained in the Top Ten for a year and sold two million copies. “Mack the Knife” won the 1959 Grammy Award for Best Record of the Year and Darin was named Best New Artist.
When “Beyond the Sea,” Darin’s version of Charles Trenet’s “La Mer,” became a hit as well, the singer could do no wrong and began appearing at the Copacabana nightclub in New York, where he set the all-time attendance record. In time, Darin would record twenty hits for Atco, the label from which he had nearly been released by Herb Abramson.
For the partners at Atlantic, the good news was that the dry spell in which they had been mired throughout 1957 was over. “Two records got us back in the game,” Wexler would later write. “These tunes were so winning, so widely popular, so immediately irresistible, no one could keep them off the air.” One of those songs was “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters. The other was “Splish Splash.” “Each sold well over a million. At wholesale, that meant $400,000 or $500,000 in revenue.”
Despite a decade of success at Atlantic, two records with a combined running time of about four minutes had made it possible for the partners to cover their operating costs while also providing them with their yearly income. In an era when the independent record business was still a crap shoot of major proportions and the pressure to come up with hits was unrelenting, Ahmet had proven yet again he had a set of magic ears.
Atlantic chose to celebrate its tenth year in the record business by filling the January 13, 1958, edition of Billboard with nineteen pages of articles and congratulatory ads that purported to tell the real story of how the company had grown “during one of the industry’s liveliest ten year periods” and so was now poised to become a major label. Both Ahmet and Nesuhi contributed signed pieces in which they discussed Atlantic’s humble beginnings as well as its very bright future in the jazz LP field.
In alphabetical order beneath their photographs, Atlantic’s brightest stars were profiled while being featured in quarter-page ads bearing their likeness, for which they had most likely paid. Now married to Freddy Bienstock, an Austrian-born executive at Hill & Range, the music publishing company whose number one client was Elvis Presley, the former Miriam Abramson was lauded for her vital role in having kept the label afloat in an article entitled “Atlantic’s ‘Money Man’ Is a Woman.”
While Jerry Wexler received scant notice in the extensive outlay, he did sign (as Gerald Wexler) an introductory statement in which the partners (including Herb Abramson) proudly noted that during the past decade Atlantic had issued 425 singles, 100 LPs, and 109 extended play records. “We started as young collectors and jazz enthusiasts,” the statement read, “and thought (naively, perhaps) that it would be a ‘ball’ to combine business with our main source of pleasure in life. If the truth be told, we are still fans and amateurs—and hope that we’ll never get so old that we’ll change in this respect.”
After thanking all the distributors, disc jockeys, retailers, and jukebox operators who had kept Atlantic “alive and healthy for a decade,” the partners concluded by writing, “Our pleasant association with them makes us look forward with keen anticipation to another decade of progress.” A photograph of ten birthday candles blazing away on a turntable strewn with ribbons filled the rest of the page.
On every level, “The Atlantic Records Story, 1948–1958” was an impeccable piece of record business publicity. What seems most remarkable about it now is the incredible litany of companies that felt compelled to take out ads to congratulate the label on its success. In what was then still very much a business of personal relationships where everyone had to stay on the good side of those who paid their bills on time, companies indebted to Atlantic for their continued survival were only too happy to publicly proclaim their loyalty. Nowhere in this extended promotional package could the names of any disc jockeys or the radio stations for whom they worked be found. Insofar as they were concerned, Atlantic was but one of the many suitors vying for attention on their weekly play lists.
To court their favor, Atlantic played a prominent role in the legendary second annual disc jockey convention sponsored by Todd Storz, the creator of the Top 40 radio format, at the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour, Florida, during the 1959 Memorial Day weekend. At an event that would spawn a thousand stories and be immortalized in a Miami News headline reading, “FOR DEEJAYS: BABES, BOOZE, AND BRIBES,” Ahmet chose to promote his label in his own unique manner.
Sponsored by nearly fifty record companies including all of the major labels, the convention was “a lavish and lascivious four-day bacchanal” at which 2,500 disc jockeys from all over the country were treated free of charge to “around-the-clock receptions, parties, concerts, and gambling junkets to Havana.” When they arrived at the convention, the deejays were each handed a million dollars in “play money” by RCA so they could begin gambling with it. For every visit they paid to the company’s hospitality suite where “liquid refreshments” were available for free, they received another $5,000 in scrip. On Memorial Day in exchange for the play money, RCA auctioned off a stereo set, a color TV, $500 worth of clothing, a trip for two to Europe, and a Studebaker Lark.
As Joe Smith, a Yale graduate who would become the president of Warner Bros. Records but was then a very popular AM disc jockey in Boston, would later say, “I was one of the board members of that convention in Miami Beach. I had just been married so I took my wife there. I was playing blackjack and I went bust and the guy gave me more chips. She said, ‘Aren’t you supposed to lose?’ I said, ‘Shhh. I can never lose. So long as my ratings are up there.’ ”
Nonstop gambling was not the only divertissement offered to the disc jockeys over the course of the holiday weekend. Then seventeen years old, Marshall Chess would remember smoking pot for the first time at the convention. Long before it became a staple of the hippie culture during the 1960s, marijuana was widely available in the music business and, as he recalled, “They were bringing pot into the Brill Building in New York in these big garbage bags and selling it for twenty dollars an ounce. They called it ‘mezz.’ ”
The convention also featured what writer William Barlow called “one of the largest contingents of hookers ever assembled at a hotel in Miami Beach” with some prostitutes having been “recruited from as far away as New York City.” In Marshall Chess’s words, “I remember Ahmet and all these other guys at the convention standing in a circle and there was a guy in the middle fucking a whore and everyone was throwing hundred-dollar bills betting on how long he could fuck her.”
In the words of Paul Marshall, who attended the event, “Ahmet hired a certain number of hookers. However, he got them gowns and introduced them as the cream of Miami debutante society. And he told them he would double their fee if they did not have sex with the guests. After Jerry Blaine had danced with them all, he made a pass at one and she slapped him across the face. We were all beside ourselves because all the Atlantic people knew they were hookers.”
Morris Levy of Roulette Records, who in Paul Marshall’s words was “in the mob” and “ran about eighty or ninety hat check concessions in nightclubs” in New York City, spent $15,000 for an all-night barbecue that featured the Count Basie band. Half the money went to pay for two thousand bottles of bourbon. All told, the estimated cost of the weekend for the record companies was $250,000.
At “a great breakfast Atlantic gave at that convention,” the featured speaker was the comedian Professor Irwin Corey. Decked out in seedy formal attire and sneakers, Corey, who billed himself as “The World’s Foremost Authority,” would deliver long, rambling monologues filled with double talk that would suddenly make eminent sense while also being incredibly funny. “Remember,” Marshall would later say, “these were disc jockeys from Keokuk, Iowa. They introduced him as ‘Professor Irwin Corey from Harvard University, an expert in the field,’ and he said, ‘And, as one of the great leaders of the phonographic industry, Mr. Morris Levy, has said, “A man can get further in the music industry with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.” ’ And nobody laughed. But at the dais, we all fell over.”
The event was such an ostentatious public demonstration of the overwhelming power wielded by the nation’s disc jockeys as well as the outrageous lengths to which record companies would go to service their every need that the ensuing “media frenzy” over what was characterized as a full-fledged orgy caught the attention of the Legislative Oversight Subcommittee of the United States House Interstate Commerce Committee. In February 1960, fresh from its news-making exposé of the networks’ rigged quiz shows, the subcommittee began public hearings into payola, the form of commercial bribery that had for years been standard practice in the music industry.
“When I first started working for King Records in 1958,” Bob Krasnow, the founder of Blue Thumb Records, remembered, “I paid off everybody. It was just the thing to do. If you didn’t pay to play, you didn’t get played. One of my jobs was to call on Dick Clark. I couldn’t pay off Dick so I figured out if I could get my records on WIBG radio in Philadelphia, Dick would hear them and that would grease the way.”
The top jock at WIBG was Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue, who after the payola scandal broke moved to San Francisco, where in 1967 he transformed KMPX into the first alternative free-form FM rock radio station in America. “Tom Donahue was one of my great mentors,” Krasnow recalled, “and I was awed by him. I brought him a record one day and I had money on me to take care of him and he listened to the record and he said, ‘Wow, that’s a grand record, man.’ Then he looked me straight in the face and said, ‘No, Bob, that’s a two grand record.’ I realized what mercenaries they were. I thought the guy liked me.”
On May 19, 1960, along with the program director at WINS and five other deejays, among them Hal Jackson, for whom Ahmet had written “The House That Jack Built,” which became Jackson’s radio show theme song in Washington, Alan Freed was arrested for taking payola. In a continuing drama reminiscent of the recent quiz show hearings that received front-page newspaper coverage all over the country, one well-known disc jockey after another appeared before the committee to admit their complicity in a practice that had been an industry standard for decades.
The hearings effectively destroyed Alan Freed’s career, and he died a broken man five years later at the age of forty-four. Dick Clark, who was also called to testify before the subcommittee and steadfastly denied ever taking payola, survived as the host of American Bandstand after being forced by ABC television to divest himself of his own extensive record business interests.
The only two labels who never signed the Federal Trade Commission consent decree stipulating that record companies would no longer engage in payola were Chess and Atlantic, both of whom were represented by Paul Marshall. As he would later say, “When I read the decree, I noticed the big companies like RCA and CBS had signed it but that my clients were being asked to sign it as corporations and as individuals. So I looked up the law and I determined there was no crime. There was no statute which made payola illegal.”
The theory behind the commercial bribery statute under which Alan Freed had been prosecuted for taking payola was that money paid to the deejays should have been paid to their employers. However, existing Federal Communications Commission rules prohibited radio station owners from receiving such payments. “Therefore the money wasn’t being diverted,” Marshall contended. “They weren’t paying the owner and they couldn’t pay the owner. They paid the disc jockey. And I likened it to a tip. If any establishment says you can give our employees special favors or benefits, then it didn’t lose anything. Ergo, there was no money stolen.”
Marshall also argued that the only deejays paid to play music on the air were those who already had “a very substantial audience.” Since “the crime consisted of changing and affecting public taste,” the fact that “people had already accepted these guys before they ever got paid” made this charge also impossible to prove. In Marshall’s words, “There used to be songs called ‘turntable hits’ which got a lot of play but never sold a record.”
In the end, the 1960 payola scandal affected only the major labels, which then began hiring third-party promotion men who would sign contracts acknowledging they could, in Marshall’s words, “never talk to a disc jockey even if he was his brother. By signing it, they made the government happy and they could say, ‘Look, they’re doing what they can do.’ It was all bullshit.”
“In the very beginning,” Ahmet admitted, “I made a lot of friends among disc jockeys and they played my records. A few would look for favors of one kind or another. And we were in a position where we really had to deliver some favors to get our records played. When there were very important stations that were playing our competition much more than us, we would go see what we could do to befriend those people. And sometimes they would ask for some remuneration which we very often came through with. After the first payola investigations, we hired other people to look after that and I think that was the position most record companies were in all over the world.”
At both the convention in Miami Beach and then during the public hearings that ruined the lives and careers of disc jockeys throughout America, Ahmet and his label somehow managed yet again to emerge unscathed. The partners at Atlantic went right on doing business as usual by putting money into the hands of those who could make or break their latest releases by playing them on the air.
Far more than the death of his father or the failure of his marriage, the overwhelming sense of personal loss Ahmet experienced when the artist he loved and respected above all others left Atlantic shook him to the very core of his being. After a decade in the business, Ahmet learned for the first time that his relationship with those who recorded for him was based on mutual need and so would always end in time. Despite how close he would become to many of his artists over the next five decades, Ahmet never made the same mistake again.
Along with Jerry Wexler, Ahmet was in the Atlantic office on the night of February 18, 1959, when his great favorite Ray Charles cut a song he had regularly been performing with his band. Running more than seven and a half minutes, “What’d I Say” began with Charles playing a very rapid, raunchy, and completely irresistible riff on electric piano for a minute and a half before finally singing a series of lines including the one about the girl with the diamond ring who really knew how to shake that thing from “Mess Around.”
More than four minutes into the track, Charles suddenly stopped singing and playing. As his biographer Michael Lydon wrote, “Immediately a gaggle of men and women’s voices rise in protest. They want the music to keep going, and though pretending he doesn’t understand, Ray starts again” by exchanging a series of guttural sexual moans and grunts with his female backup singers, “the grunts each time becoming more edged with sexual pleasure until Ray is screaming, the ladies moaning, and the band rocking. Out of the ecstatic tumult come exhortations to ‘Shake that thing,’ and the general agreement, ‘Don’t it make you feel all right!’ ”
Combining elements of jazz, gospel, and the call-and-response of Mississippi Delta field blues into a mind-blowing synthesis of filthy funk and nonstop driving rhythm, the track was unlike anything anyone had ever heard before, much less recorded. Understandably, neither Ahmet nor Wexler knew what to do with a cut they thought had “dance-craze possibilities” until Tom Dowd edited out “unwanted choruses and telescoped the track to two three-minute sides of a 45 entitled “What’d I Say Parts I & II.”
Realizing “they had a record too hot for spring release,” the partners decided to hold it back until June so it could become “the dance hit of the summer.” Ray Charles’s first Top Ten hit, “What’d I Say” spent fifteen weeks on the pop charts and became the number one R&B single. The song sold a million copies, making it the artist’s first gold record.
A landmark track that broke down the barriers of what was then considered suitable for radio play, “What’d I Say” became, as Lydon wrote, “the life of a million parties, the spark of as many romances, a song to date the summer by.” When a seventeen-year-old bass player named Paul McCartney first heard the song in Liverpool, chills went up and down his spine and he suddenly knew what he wanted to do with his musical career.
A bigger hit by far than “I Got a Woman” had been four years earlier, “What’d I Say” brought Ray Charles the largest royalties of his career. It also raised his price on the road and made “a fortune” for Atlantic by contributing to “the label’s first-ever million-dollar month in gross sales.” For Ahmet and Wexler, the only bad news was that since Ray Charles’s contract with the label was about to expire in the fall, they would now have to come up with a much better offer to re-sign him.
Aside from how much both partners valued Ray Charles as an artist, their need to keep him on Atlantic was compounded by the fact that when Clyde McPhatter’s contract with Atlantic had ended in March, he had signed with MGM Records for a guaranteed income of $50,000 a year. United Artists and Warner Bros. Records had also bid for his services, thereby making it plain that major labels were now eager to acquire black artists.
A performer whom Ahmet called “a singer from heaven with the most lyrical voice,” McPhatter had put together the Drifters after being fired from Billy Ward and the Dominoes. At his first session for Atlantic, Wexler cut “Money Honey” with him and the cut went to number one on the R&B charts. Ahmet then wrote what Wexler considered his greatest song for McPhatter, a direct forerunner of “The Twist” entitled “Whatcha Gonna Do,” but the record went nowhere. McPhatter had another hit with “Honey Love,” which Wexler cowrote. Then McPhatter was drafted. When he returned from the army, Herb Abramson produced a hit entitled “Seven Days” and then had him cut “Treasure of Love,” a number one R&B hit in 1956.
After finally breaking through to the white market with “A Lover’s Question” in 1958, McPhatter jumped ship at Atlantic and took the big money offered by MGM. Despite what McPhatter had done, Ahmet and Wexler still felt that they could re-sign Ray Charles.
What neither man knew was that Larry Myers, a young agent in the Billy Shaw agency, had already decided the best thing he could do for Ray Charles was get him off Atlantic. By continuing to record for what Myers viewed as a black label, Charles, who was then earning a thousand dollars a night on the road, would remain “stuck in a black world” and would never be able to make the kind of money paid only to musicians who entertained white audiences in America.
When Myers presented his case to Milt Shaw, who after the death of his brother Billy had begun managing Charles, Shaw told him Atlantic had been doing a great job with the singer and he was not eager to encourage him to leave the label. Myers eventually persuaded Shaw to tell Charles he should wait to re-sign with Atlantic in the hope a major label might offer him a better deal. What in time would become a classic music business ploy achieved one immediate result.
Suddenly worried that Charles might actually be thinking about leaving Atlantic, Ahmet and Wexler began doing all they could to re-sign him. Ahmet flew to the Midwest twice with a contract for Charles to sign only to realize the artist was avoiding him. To no avail, Ahmet offered one of Charles’s close associates a payment of $5,000 or $10,000 if he could persuade the singer to stay at Atlantic.
Working behind the scenes, Myers went to ABC-Paramount Records, a major label that had been founded four years earlier by Sam Clark, a record distributor from Boston who had been given half a million dollars by Leonard Goldenson to bring ABC into the record business. A most unlikely bidder for Charles’s services, the label had released thoroughly white-bread hits like “A Rose and a Baby Ruth” by George Hamilton IV and Paul Anka’s “Diana” while also distributing teenage smashes on the Chancellor label by American Bandstand pop idols Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Lloyd Price, their first black artist, had scored a hit with “Personality” but the song had little in common with the kind of gutbucket soul that had become Ray Charles’s stock in trade.
As Myers soon learned, ABC-Paramount was not only eager to sign Ray Charles but were also willing to offer him the kind of deal no artist in the record business had ever been given before. After Milt Shaw told Charles to meet with ABC-Paramount in October 1959, Sam Clark offered to let Charles produce his own records, which the label would then distribute for a fee. Clark told Charles he would sell far more records on a major label, thereby enabling him to attract white audiences to his shows. Once his records had earned back their advance, Charles would earn 75 cents on the dollar for each copy sold. The singer would also be guaranteed an annual income of $50,000 on a three-year contract.
After telling Clark to write up a formal proposal so he could show it to the partners at Atlantic and give them a chance to match the offer, Charles said he also wanted to own his masters. By doing so, he would control all the rights to recordings he would make for ABC-Paramount, thereby cutting the label out of all future profits after his contract with them was over.
As no record company had ever before entered into such an agreement, Clark told him this would not be possible. Charles, who was bluffing and was already willing to accept the offer, insisted that without this provision there would be no deal. After thinking about it, Clark offered to let Charles have his masters back after five years. As Charles’s lawyer told him, not even Frank Sinatra had ever gotten this kind of deal.
Taking the ABC-Paramount offer to Ahmet and Wexler, Charles said if they matched it, he would stay at Atlantic. Telling the artist they loved him, the partners said they could not possibly agree to such a deal but left the meeting thinking negotiations had only just begun and they would have the opportunity to talk with him again. Ahmet in particular was confident the deal would eventually be done because he was not only the first to have recognized Ray Charles’s talent but had also allowed him to do as he liked in the studio, thereby enabling Charles to transform himself into the great artist he had become.
While Charles had rewarded Ahmet’s faith by making great records, both partners had also done all they could to push his releases because of their unwavering faith in him. Both Ahmet and Wexler felt certain Charles would stay on the label that had for so long been his home rather than sign with a “soulless corporation” where no one would ever love or understand his music as well as they did.
At what was then the most expensive session in the history of Atlantic, Nesuhi had brought in the entire Count Basie band and half of the Duke Ellington orchestra to join Ray Charles’s own band in the studio. With more than forty musicians behind him, the singer cut twelve standards (six of which were produced by Wexler), thereby demonstrating he could do far more than sing his own brand of gospel-charged rhythm and blues.
When Atlantic released The Genius of Ray Charles album in November, it sent more than three thousand promotional EPs to disc jockeys and took out the first full-page ad for Ray Charles in Billboard. When the month ended without either Ahmet or Wexler having heard from Charles or his manager, someone called Atlantic to say the word on the street was that Charles had already signed with ABC-Paramount and the contract was on file with the musicians’ union.
On December 7, 1959, Billboard announced the deal. A week later, the trade paper provided details of the “exceptional” 75–25 split Charles had been given at ABC-Paramount. Ahmet would later say that for him the news was “emotionally, a great blow.” Having always considered Ray Charles his friend, Ahmet could not understand why the artist had never given Atlantic a chance to come back with a second offer.
Even though he had been considerably less personally involved with the artist than Ahmet, Jerry Wexler now had a real reason to worry and lay awake one night until dawn wondering what would become of Atlantic. Now that Ray Charles had left the label, Wexler feared they might also lose performers like Bobby Darin and perhaps even cease to exist. Expressing what everyone at Atlantic was then feeling, Herb Abramson’s former wife Miriam Bienstock would say, “We felt betrayed, it was a terrible thing.”
No one at the label was more upset by what Charles had done than Ahmet. Unable to accept that Charles himself had actually done this to him, Ahmet would say he believed Charles’s personal valet, “the guy who was doing everything for him, including buying dope and getting girls” had been taken care of by ABC-Paramount and then persuaded Charles to agree to the deal because, “in those days with Ray Charles, his signature was an ‘X’ so someone had to bring him in to put the cross in and I don’t know to what extent Ray knew about it.”
Larry Myers would later say, “I would be glad to convince Ahmet and Jerry that Ray knew all about it. Nobody put anything over on Ray.” Explaining his decision in his own words, Charles said, “Seventy-five cents out of a dollar and owning my own masters, that’s why I left Atlantic.” In Ahmet’s words, “Afterwards when there were explanations of how it happened, even though I knew it wasn’t so, I never said anything ’cause it didn’t matter, the fact is that we lost him.”
“I worked with Chris Blackwell at Island Records after Bob Marley died,” Paul Wexler recalled, “and I saw that some of the joy of being a record man had gone out of Chris when his genius went away. Who was Ahmet’s genius? Ray Charles. Ray went away. And Ahmet never fell in love with another artist like that again. And to a great extent, he was also out of the studio after that point.”
For Ahmet, the first cut was the deepest and he never did get over losing Ray Charles. Seven years after the artist had walked out on him, Ahmet was still carrying the torch. As a woman he was then seeing in Los Angeles recalled, “He was brokenhearted over Ray Charles leaving him.”
By then, the real power in the record business was being wielded by the artists. Unlike Wexler, who refused to accommodate himself to the impossible demands of rock stars accustomed to having their every whim catered to like divine right kings, Ahmet always found a way to deal with them. In the most painful way imaginable, he had already been through it all with Ray Charles.