“Jerry Wexler never liked Crosby, Stills & Nash because they wanted so much freaking artistic autonomy. While we were arguing about this, Wilson Pickett walks in the room and comes up to Jerry and says, ‘Jerry,’ and he goes, ‘Wham!’ And he puts a pistol on the table. He says, ‘If that motherfucker Tom Dowd walks into where I’m recording, I’m going to shoot him. And if you walk in, I’m going to shoot you.’ ‘Oh,’ Jerry said. ‘That’s okay, Wilson.’ Then he walked out. So I said, ‘You want to argue about artistic autonomy?’ ”
—Ahmet Ertegun
In the spring of 1968, Stephen Stills, who was then keeping company with Judy Collins, for whom he had already written “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” accompanied the folksinger to a recording session in Greenwich Village. When she left the studio to have dinner, Stills told the engineer, “Here’s a hundred bucks. Will you just keep rolling? I’ve got these songs to put down.” Thirty-four years later, three ten-inch boxes marked “Steve Stills” containing the original quarter-inch tapes that had been rescued from a Dumpster in the studio’s parking lot found their way into Graham Nash’s hands.
In Nash’s words, “It was nineteen songs Stephen had written between the end of the Springfield in May 1968 and the beginning of Crosby, Stills & Nash in August. Stephen tunes up and goes, ‘Helplessly Hoping.’ He comes to the end. ‘Change Partners.’ Comes to the end, retunes, and starts ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,’ which had never been put together and was still in three pieces. He did nineteen brilliant pieces of music that he’d written in four fucking months. That’s how focused and creative he was at that point in his life. He had the music. In spades.”
Intent on pursuing rock stardom despite the breakup of the Springfield, the band Stills formed with David Crosby and Graham Nash, two seasoned music business veterans who had also left their original groups for different reasons, soon attained the kind of rarefied status only great Hollywood movie stars had known. At a time when the postwar baby boom generation was coming of age and the counterculture was in full bloom, Crosby, Stills & Nash came to represent the social and political concerns their adoring fans held most dear. Their debut album would eventually sell more than three million copies.
A working-class boy from Blackpool, England, Graham Nash grew up in Manchester, where in 1963 he and his schoolmate Allan Clarke formed the Hollies. Named after Buddy Holly, the group had a series of harmony-driven pop hits in the United States. Nash had already begun looking to expand his musical horizons when he met the man who became his best friend and lifelong musical partner.
Unlike Nash, David Van Cortlandt Crosby was a child of privilege who could trace his family lineage back to a surgeon who had served on George Washington’s staff during the Revolutionary War. His father, Floyd Crosby, was a brilliant cinematographer who won an Academy Award in 1931 for his work with documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty on Tabu and later shot High Noon, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 multiple Academy Award-winning western drama starring Gary Cooper.
After graduating from the exclusive Cate School in Carpinteria, California, David Crosby dropped out of college to pursue a career in music and became a founding member of the Byrds with Jim McGuinn, Chris Hillman, and Gene Clark. The group had a number one hit in 1965 with its cover version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Crosby then cowrote “Eight Miles High” with Clark and McGuinn.
At the Monterey Pop Festival in May 1967, Crosby angered McGuinn and Hillman by talking about politics between songs during the group’s set and then obliging his good friend Stills by taking Neil Young’s place in Buffalo Springfield when they performed. After Crosby clashed with McGuinn and Hillman during a subsequent recording session, they dismissed him from the band.
A year later, Crosby and Stills sang with Nash for the first time at the singer Cass Elliot’s house in Los Angeles. As Nash would later say, “We all knew. There was no fucking question. David and Stephen and I would sing almost that whole first album with one acoustic guitar and kill people. It was obvious that this was something really new and fresh and unheard of before.” The producer Paul Rothchild then cut a two-song demo with the trio that he played for Ahmet. “In the middle of the first song,” Rothchild recalled, “Ahmet takes out the checkbook and says, ‘Fill in the number. I don’t care—whatever it is doesn’t matter.’ ”
While Stills would later say all three musicians “were morally committed to Ahmet from the start” and that he “was really like the Mother Superior of this group,” the trio was not yet ready to sign a recording contract. Nonetheless, when Stills told Ahmet he wanted to go with Crosby to visit Nash in England so they could rehearse together but did not have the money to make the trip, Ahmet, in Nash’s words, “reached in his desk and gave him two thousand dollars.”
As neither the group nor Stills had a manager, Ahmet instructed Stills to contact Robert Stigwood while he was in London. The Australian-born rock impresario, who had begun his show business career as a theatrical agent, was then running his own label, RSO Records, while also managing Cream, a band that had broken big for Ahmet in America after recording the album Disraeli Gears in four days in May 1967 at Atlantic in New York. Two practical jokers who shared an affinity for the high life, Ahmet and Stigwood soon became close friends as well as business partners.
In Stigwood’s words, “Ahmet was giving me Stephen Stills to manage. Stills flew in from New York and came to my office in Brook Street and I said, ‘Nice to meet you. Let’s have dinner or something.’ And he said, ‘On the way here, I saw a Rolls-Royce in the window of a car shop and I liked it. Can you have it delivered for me tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Well, I think we should talk about whether we’re working together first.’ He said, ‘We’ve decided on you. Ahmet said Stiggy would be good.’ I said, ‘That’s all well and good. But I’m not that good.’ I already had enough to contend with. One visit to my office and that was it.”
After Crosby, Stills & Nash returned from London where they had played a tape of their music for George Harrison with a view to being signed by Apple only to have him turn them down, they went looking for a manager before seeking a record contract. As a band, their situation was complicated by the fact that although Crosby was no longer in the Byrds, the group itself was still under contract to Columbia. As a member of the Hollies, Nash was signed to Epic, a label distributed in America by Columbia. Stills, who was contractually bound to Atlantic, had already gone to Ahmet for money but apparently felt no obligation to return the favor by bringing him the band. Instead, he urged his band mates to allow David Geffen and his partner Elliot Roberts, who then managed Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, to represent them. Although Crosby said he never thought Geffen “was that nice a guy, and I didn’t trust him all the time,” he acceded to Stills’s wishes “because we were in the shark pool and we needed a shark.”
Born in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn on February 21, 1943, David Geffen was seventeen years old when his father, a self-described Jewish intellectual who held a variety of jobs and became a Christian Scientist, died in Kings County Hospital. His mother, a Russian immigrant who had worked as a seamstress during the Depression, ran a bra and corset shop in Brooklyn and called her younger son “King David.”
A starstruck kid who religiously went to neighborhood movie theaters and imagined himself onstage accepting an Academy Award while sitting in Radio City Music Hall, Geffen was a teenager when he read a biography of Louis B. Mayer. The storied head of MGM then became his idol. After graduating from New Utrecht High School, Geffen joined his older brother in Los Angeles. He then dropped out of Santa Monica City College, Brooklyn College, and the University of Texas before going to work as an usher at CBS Television City only to be fired for swinging at a man who cheered Art Linkletter’s announcement that he was going to do his show on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
Determined to make a career in show business, Geffen passed himself off as a UCLA theater arts graduate and was hired to work in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency in New York. In a story that would become part of his show business legend, Geffen intercepted a letter from the university so his older brother could then write one attesting his résumé was accurate. In the mailroom, Geffen met his future partner Elliot Roberts, born Elliot Rabinowitz in the Bronx, and showed him how he had learned “the rudiments of deal making by studying memos and opening the mail.”
Cutting corners and pulling moves that astonished even the most ambitious of his contemporaries, Geffen quickly rose through the ranks at William Morris and became a music agent, representing the Youngbloods and signing the Association. While managing the career of singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, he formed a close personal relationship with Clive Davis of Columbia, who became his first mentor in the record business. After Geffen played the Crosby, Stills and Nash demos for Davis, he assured Davis he would bring him the band as soon as he persuaded Atlantic to release Stills from his contract.
Not knowing whom else to contact at the label, Geffen made an appointment to see Jerry Wexler in his office at 1841 Broadway. Making his pitch, Geffen explained that since Buffalo Springfield had broken up, he was really not asking all that much by requesting Stills’s release. While Wexler had never been a fan of the band’s music and had little use for what he liked to call the long-haired “rockoids” of whom Ahmet was so fond, he liked agents even less. Exploding into one of his characteristic rages, Wexler barked, “Get the fuck outta here!” Picking up the much smaller Geffen, Wexler threw him out of his office. When Geffen returned to his Central Park apartment, where Stills was eagerly waiting to hear what had happened at Atlantic, Geffen told him, “My God, they’re animals over there. We’ve got to get you out of there.”
The next day, Wexler called Geffen to apologize for what he had done. Explaining he really had no right to be talking to him about this matter because Stills was Ahmet’s artist, Wexler arranged for Geffen to meet with Ahmet. Having already invested money in the band, Ahmet should have been infuriated by Stills’s decision to let Geffen go behind his back to try to sign them to another label. Far too skilled a diplomat to ever let his feelings interfere with what he already saw as a hugely profitable deal for Atlantic, Ahmet instead took a completely different tack.
In Geffen’s words, their first meeting was “love at first sight . . . After an hour, he had me so completely charmed that there was nothing I wouldn’t have done for him . . . Our relationship began with him courting me. It was a seduction. He was a genius at it and I went for it hook, line, and sinker. This guy was treating me like I was the most important person in the world to him at that moment. I just thought he was the greatest thing since chocolate chip cookies.”
After Ahmet had convinced Geffen “he was the better person for CS&N,” the manager hurried down to Black Rock, the CBS building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 52nd Street, where he told Clive Davis he had changed his mind and asked him to release Crosby and Nash from their contracts. Upset that Geffen had reneged on his promise to bring him the group, Davis refused to let them go. In Geffen’s words, “Clive said, ‘Absolutely no. We’ll have to work out some kind of compromise. For instance, I’ll take the first record, and they can have the subsequent records.’ I told Ahmet what Clive had proposed. Ahmet said, ‘Listen, I wouldn’t guarantee that these guys will be together to finish even a first record. Tell Clive I’ll take the first record, and then he can have all the rest.’ ”
Even if Ahmet had not already wanted to sign Crosby, Stills & Nash, he now had yet another incentive to pursue the deal. As Bob Rolontz, the longtime head of publicity at Atlantic, would later say, “Ahmet knew how to play Clive. When he got an act that wasn’t quite right, he would spread the word that it was a great band and Clive would sign them for big money.” Adding fuel to the fire, the two men had by then already gone head to head for more than one act.
After Moby Grape had told Ahmet they would sign with Atlantic because he had promised to work closely with them on their album, one of the members of the group called to tell him that because Davis had offered them twice as much money, the band had signed with him instead. They had however inserted a clause into their contract that would permit Ahmet to come into the studio and work with them as much as he liked.
Knowing he had lost the band to Davis, Ahmet said he was very sorry to hear the news because he had intended to put out three singles at once when the album was released, something no record company had ever done before. A few months later, Ahmet was delighted to read in Billboard that the new Moby Grape album was coming out with three singles. As he would later say, “They made them do it. Which was one of the reasons that the record didn’t make it.”
At the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, where the two record business moguls often found themselves watching one another as they did business from their respective poolside cabanas, Davis was talking to violinist David LaFlamme and two other members of the San Francisco band It’s a Beautiful Day whom he had just auditioned. As Ahmet walked by, he said, “Look, I don’t know who you are, but you are talking to the best in the business. You can’t do any better than to entrust your musical lives to him.” In his autobiography, Davis wrote, “The group was impressed and I was more than touched by this tribute.” That Ahmet had no interest in the band and wanted Davis to sign them seems never to have occurred to him, either at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool or when he wrote his book.
In 1972 when Ahmet became convinced that Delaney Bramlett’s drug problems would prevent Delaney & Bonnie from ever achieving widespread commercial success, he sold them to Davis at Columbia for $600,000. Jerry Wexler would later say earning this much money from an act without producing an album was even more creative than making records. The Delaney & Bonnie album on Columbia went nowhere.
Ahmet was now competing with Clive Davis not only for Crosby, Stills & Nash but David Geffen as well. Able to size up people in an instant and use that knowledge to his own advantage, Ahmet had immediately understood that Geffen’s music business know-how, immense ambition, and deep-seated need for wealth and social prestige would make him an invaluable protégé. As Bob Rolontz would later say, “Ahmet stole Geffen away from Clive Davis.”
Realizing Geffen had already decided to sign Crosby, Stills and Nash to Atlantic, Davis told him that in return for releasing Crosby and Nash from Columbia, he wanted Poco, a new band Atlantic had signed formed by Richie Furay of the Springfield and Jim Messina, the studio engineer who had replaced Bruce Palmer on bass. In itself, this demand was unprecedented in the record business. When Geffen relayed Davis’s offer, Ahmet said, “That’s pretty heavy,” and turned him down. After Geffen pleaded with him by saying, “Ahmet, you must do this for me,” he agreed to the deal.
While Stephen Stills would later claim he said, “Ahmet, you gotta think like you’re a baseball team owner. We’re going to trade Richie Furay for Graham Nash,” the truth of the matter was that all on his own, Ahmet had won this one going away. In one fell swoop, he had swapped a band that would never make it as big for Crosby, Stills & Nash while also taking David Geffen away from Clive Davis. And while Geffen’s idol as a teenager had been Louis B. Mayer, he had just unwittingly cast himself as Irving Thalberg, Mayer’s second-in-command.
Marijuana smoke filled the air as Ahmet and Jerry Wexler walked into Wally Heider’s Studio on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles where Crosby, Stills, and Nash had sometimes been doing as many as thirty takes of a song to get the vocals right while recording their debut album for Atlantic. As Phil Spector trailed in behind the partners, Stephen Stills immediately stopped what he was doing to greet Ahmet with a bear hug. “Yessir, we’re working hard,” David Crosby said. “At two bucks a minute, we can’t afford to socialize. We may even bring this one in on time, Ahmet. That’ll improve our reputation in the business a lot, right? ’Specially Stills.”
As Stills guffawed, Ahmet affectionately ruffled the musician’s hair. Making a joke of his own, Wexler suggested the band call their album Music from Big Ego. When the idea was flatly rejected, Wexler mumbled, “Guess they don’t have the distance to appreciate it.” After meeting Ahmet for the first time in the studio, Graham Nash would later say, “This guy could make wallpaper turn around and look at him. Every time he walked into a room, it didn’t matter who else was there. Elvis could have been there and everyone would have been looking at Ahmet. It was very obvious when he walked into the room that this was a mighty, mighty presence.”
After Ahmet, Wexler, and Spector left that night, the band spent nine hours cutting Crosby’s “Long Time Coming.” Everyone then went home except for Stills, who stayed behind until dawn working on a new arrangement that helped Crosby find himself as a lead vocalist. “At that point in his life,” Nash recalled, “Stephen was an incredibly focused person. Without question, he was the leader of this band and there was a reason we called him ‘Captain Many Hands.’ He played everything on that first album except drums and the guitar I played on ‘Lady of the Island’ and the guitar Crosby played on ‘Guinevere.’ ”
In the words of Ellen Sander, a rock critic who was present during many of those sessions, “Everybody is driven in a different way but with Stephen, it was really kind of obvious. He couldn’t keep his hands off the board and he was driving the engineer crazy. He was just so consummately involved that he was with every single note every single minute. Stephen once said to me he realized what Buffalo Springfield had thrown away on the verge of what would have been an incredible run and he didn’t want to see this venture go amiss.”
While there had been nothing but sweetness and light between the band and the partners at Atlantic in the studio, a set-to that occurred before the album was released should have served as an early warning that the balance of power in the record business had shifted. Because Crosby, Stills, and Nash viewed themselves as artists with a capital “A,” they would never be as easy to control as the acts with which the label had long since become accustomed to dealing.
“Did you know that Tommy Dowd remixed our first record?” Nash would later say. “It’s not known and you know why? Because Crosby said, ‘If you ever touch our fucking music again, I will cut off your arms.’ I’m sure Ahmet must have had him do it but the point was—‘Don’t fuck with our music without us.’ ” When David Geffen finally played the completed album for Ahmet in New York, he excitedly exclaimed, “They’re going to be huge! They’re going to be huge!” but then added, “They’re not going to be as big as the Association.”
After the Crosby, Stills & Nash album had been released to great critical acclaim and massive sales, the band was scheduled to perform in Chicago with Joni Mitchell opening for them and then at the Woodstock Arts and Music Festival. A protracted discussion soon began about finding another musician to join them onstage. “Absolutely, there was a conversation,” Nash recalled. “We recognized Stephen needed some kind of impetus to push him into a different realm. He could play great lead guitar on his own. But it was obvious that when he was competitive with someone, it went to a higher level. We considered Stevie Winwood. And Jimi Hendrix. I’m not kidding. Now, that would have been a band.”
As it turned out, neither Winwood, Hendrix, nor Mark Naftalin, the keyboard player in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, was interested. David Geffen, Elliot Roberts, and Stills were having dinner with Ahmet in his Manhattan town house one night when he put on some old Buffalo Springfield albums and said, “We ought to add Neil to CSN. There’s something about Neil Young that goes with this.” Stills responded by saying, “But, Ahmet, he’s already quit on me twice. What do you think’s gonna happen this time?”
Nonetheless, Ahmet’s idea made eminent sense to all concerned and when Roberts told Stills he would have to make the offer to Young himself, he did so. In Nash’s words, “Neil and Stephen’s relationship was pretty fiery at that point. They loved and hated each other. And they still do, to this day.” In return for joining his former Buffalo Springfield band mate, Young wanted his name on the group as well as an equal share of the money. After his request was granted, the band began touring as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and their “concert price skyrocketed.”
Before Atlantic issued Déjà Vu, the group’s second album, a meeting concerning the cover took place in Ahmet’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Inspired by Stills’s great love for Civil War tintypes “and family journals of the 1860’s,” art director Gary Burden presented the partners with a cover featuring gold foil stamped lettering on “beautiful paper that was almost leather in feel and had a great bumped-up texture” made by “a family-operated paper mill in Georgia.” The band loved it. To that point in time, album covers had cost about nineteen cents apiece to manufacture. The one Burden presented would have cost sixty-nine cents.
Emerging from the bathroom of the bungalow with his dark black hair bristling in every direction from his sleeveless undershirt, Jerry Wexler snapped, “Fucking artist appeasement! We could put it out in a brown paper bag and people would still buy it!” In the end, the band got its way and the cover was approved. Released in March 1970, Déjà Vu topped the charts and generated three hit singles.
On May 15, 1970, Ahmet was with the group at the Record Plant in Los Angeles when they recorded “Ohio,” a song Neil Young had written after reading a Life magazine article about the killing of four Kent State students during an on-campus protest eleven days earlier. After taking the masters with him to New York, Ahmet released the song eight days later. Backed with Stills’s “Find the Cost of Freedom,” the record became a smash hit that overtook Nash’s “Teach Your Children” on the charts.
As their fame mounted, the group became increasingly difficult to handle. When they played the Fillmore East in New York City in the spring of 1970, the playwright John Ford Noonan, then a member of the stage crew, called them “The Supremes.” To get the group to do an encore for their fans, promoter Bill Graham had to shove hundred-dollar bills under their dressing room door. Bidding farewell to the audience by saying he would see them in the street, Stills would then walk each night to his waiting limo so he could be driven back to his hotel.
During their hugely successful 1970 summer tour, Stills so angered Neil Young at one show by hogging the spotlight that Young walked off stage and would not return for an encore. When the singer Rita Coolidge left Stills to be with Nash, the band broke up. At this point, even Ahmet believed Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were finally done.
At dinner one night in New York with rock critic Ellen Sander and Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman, Ahmet sorrowfully shook his head and said, “That group is gone. The only way they’ll get back together again is for the others to go to Stills and ask him to come back and they’d never do it, they’re too proud and too hurt.” When Holzman suggested Ahmet could get someone just as famous and talented to replace Stills, Ahmet asked who that might be. “Paul McCartney,” Holzman replied. Without missing a beat, Ahmet said, “That’s a tremendous idea. Tremendous!” Lowering his voice, he added, “I wonder how much Apple would give me for the other three.”
Once cocaine became the drug of choice in the rock scene, Stephen Stills became the subject of as many negative stories as have ever been told about any performer in the history of the music business. After CSNY’s live album 4 Way Street appeared in April 1971, David Geffen fired Stills as a client. Stills then printed bumper stickers that read, “Who is David Geffen and why is he saying those terrible things about me?”
Beginning a series of melodramatic breakups and reunions worthy of a Spanish telenovela, the individual members of the group made their own successful solo albums, tried to record together again, and then scrapped that project as well. Maintaining his relationship with all four artists, Ahmet released Crosby’s solo album If I Could Remember My Name, Crosby and Nash’s successful debut effort, and Nash’s first two solo albums, Songs for Beginners and Wild Tales.
Coming off stage one night during his 1973 “Tonight’s the Night” English tour, a “really drunk” Neil Young told Elliot Roberts that the set had gone so well he was going out for an encore. “Neil,” Roberts said, “do an encore to who? There’s no one here but Ahmet.” “Ahmet’s here?” Young asked. After being told he was sitting out front with a row of people, Young said, “All right! That’s who was applauding.” Walking back out onstage, Young did a three-song encore for him.
In Nash’s words, “CSN signed with Atlantic for six albums. A record a year for six years. We’ve only just done six albums. My point is that Ahmet kept all those fuckers away from us. All those lawyers who said, ‘Hey, the contract says . . .’ And Ahmet would always be the one who said, ‘Hey, leave them alone. Whatever they do, we will take.’ No record guy ever got along better with his artists.”
Which was not to say there were not also problems along the way. David Geffen was at a John Lennon recording session in Los Angeles in 1974 when he received an urgent call from Crosby. Screaming on the line, Crosby began calling his manager a crook and a thief and a motherfucker. Demanding to know how Crosby dared speak to him like that, Geffen hung up and then called Crosby’s business manager to say he had just gotten a horrible call from the musician. Laughing, the business manager explained that he had just done an audit on Atlantic Records only to learn Ahmet had charged all the trips on which he had invited Geffen to accompany him to Crosby and Nash’s joint royalty account. Calling Ahmet, Geffen, now furious himself, demanded to know how he could have done such a thing. Laughing, Ahmet replied, “What’s the problem? They found it? We’ll pay it.”
Ahmet’s long-standing relationship with Stills ended a year later. Unable to get the musician into the studio to record with Young, Tom Dowd scolded Stills who then called Ahmet with his own version of what had transpired. Calling Dowd at home that night, Ahmet gave him hell only to have Dowd tell him he had no idea how out of control the sessions had become. The next day Ahmet walked into the studio at five P.M. Young came in and began working. In no condition to do the same, Stills straggled in later that night. The two men spoke. A week later, Stills was on Columbia.
Twenty-two years later, during the week of the 1997 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, who then still owed Atlantic two albums, met with Ahmet and Val Azzoli, then the cochairman and co-CEO of the label, at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. Telling Ahmet they “loved him to death” and had “always respected him,” the musicians began, in Nash’s words, “complaining bitterly that nobody at Atlantic knew who we were, they had no respect for us, they were not working our stuff, and we wanted out of there.”
Trying to pacify Crosby, Azzoli told the musician how much he loved having him on Atlantic and that he was family. “You fucking asshole!” Crosby replied. “I haven’t been on Atlantic Records for eight fucking years! Ahmet, are you fucking listening to this? This is what I fucking meant!” In Nash’s words, “That was the end of Atlantic with CSN. Ahmet let us go that day. That’s who he was.”
During the two-year period after Atlantic had been sold, Ahmet and Wexler continued to run the label as partners while setting off in distinctly different directions to pursue their own interests in a record business that was expanding more rapidly than ever. Heading south to studios in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Wexler returned to his roots and worked continuously, producing a variety of black artists whose music he loved and understood as well as anyone who ever lived.
Determined not to get fooled again by what became known as the second British invasion, during the late 1960s, Ahmet zeroed in on London as the place where he could find and sign new talent that had not yet broken in America. Setting up shop in the luxurious seventh-floor suite in the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane designed by Oliver Messel where he always felt at home, Ahmet soon became a regular in the Scotch of St. James, the city’s hippest private club.
His initial connection to the second flowering of the English music scene was Chris Blackwell. Born in London, Blackwell was a dedicated rhythm and blues devotee who had grown up in privileged circumstances in Jamaica before returning to England to attend the exclusive Harrow School. As a teenager, he would regularly come to New York to buy 78 RPM singles for 43 cents and then take them back to Jamaica, where he sold them for as much as £100 apiece to “the sound system” guys who played music and sold liquor at island parties.
As Blackwell would later say, “The key thing was for me that if I came across an Atlantic record, I would pick it and if there was one I didn’t like, I would doubt my own taste because I had so much respect for the label because of the music they put out. That was something I wanted to emulate with Island Records. Where the label itself actually helped the act because if the act was on the label then the act must be interesting.”
Twenty-two years old when he founded Island in Jamaica in 1959, Blackwell first met Ahmet a year later in New York. As Blackwell was trying to persuade Miriam Bienstock to allow him to distribute Atlantic records in Jamaica, Ahmet “popped his head in” to say he had already made such an arrangement with Byron Lee, who led the Dragonaires and owned the Dynamic Sound recording studio. Four years later when Little Millie Small had a smash hit for Island in England with “My Boy Lollipop,” Blackwell did a deal for her next record “for no advance with Atlantic instead of Columbia for a $50,000 advance, something I never made the mistake of doing again.”
Once Ahmet began making regular visits to London, he and Blackwell started to spend time together “because we were kind of kindred spirits. He was basically my hero and sort of a father figure to me. A mentor in a way. Somebody I looked up to in every respect. He clearly loved the music, he loved the people, he was not just one-dimensional, he was an extraordinary person. I knew him quite a long time before I ever did any record deals with him and we had a social relationship whenever he came to London because Ahmet wanted to make Atlantic a rock label.”
While Little Millie Small never did much business for Atlantic in America, Blackwell “thought the Spencer Davis Group would definitely succeed because they were trying to make American black music. But it wasn’t that successful. Atlantic had ‘Keep on Runnin’,’ which was the first big hit in England, and then I gave them the second one and they didn’t do that well with that one either.”
Along with Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, Ahmet was sitting in the Scotch of St. James one night when “this little kid with red hair who looked about fourteen years old” took the stage with his group. In Stone’s words, “Stevie Winwood started playing and Ahmet jumped up and said, ‘Oh my God. Who is that, man?’ And I said, ‘Ahmet, you’ll never believe this. It’s your group.’ He said, ‘That’s the best news I ever heard in my life.’ ”
A year after seeing Winwood for the first time, Ahmet threw a party at the Scotch of St. James for Wilson Pickett, who had just performed at the Astoria Theatre in Finsbury Park. Ahmet was standing at the bar in the club with his back to the stage when he heard someone playing guitar who “sounded like B. B. King.” As “there was no one in England who could play like that,” Ahmet looked over at Pickett and said, “Wilson, your guitarist sure can play the blues.” Pickett said, “My guitarist is having a drink at the bar.”
Turning to the stage, Ahmet saw “this kid with an angelic face and his eyes closed, just playing, and I said, ‘My God, who is that?’ And that was Eric Clapton.” According to Ahmet, Robert Stigwood, who was standing next to him, said, “You really think he’s great?” Ahmet replied, “He’s fabulous. We have to sign him up right away.” In Ahmet’s words, “So Stigwood got with him, and that is how Cream was formed.” In truth, as Stigwood would later say, “I took over Eric when Cream was formed. Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker had been in the Graham Bond Organisation and then they wanted to form Cream and as I was already managing them, I was asked to manage the group.”
Then twenty-one years old, Clapton had already attained cult status in England for his lead guitar work with the Yardbirds but was virtually unknown in America. Stigwood then signed Cream to his own label, RSO Records. While Ahmet would later claim he always knew Cream would make it in America, Stigwood would later say, “He wanted the Bee Gees but he actually wasn’t so keen on Cream. I played him their demo at Polydor in London and he said, ‘Oh, fabulous, fabulous. But not very commercial.’ That’s from the horse’s mouth and I don’t say this in any negative way. Part of Ahmet’s charm was that he was a great storyteller but he could really turn many corners in his story telling. I made him take Cream because I gave him the Bee Gees. And that is the absolute truth.”
The Bee Gees were three teenage brothers from Australia who sounded so much like the Beatles that radio stations in America thought their first hit, “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” had been made by the Fab Four. When they came to America for the first time and were staying with Stigwood at the Plaza Hotel, Ahmet showed up at the hotel where he “pretended he was the porter and took their luggage downstairs. He carried their bags to the elevator. They knew who he was of course.” Stigwood returned the favor in London when Ahmet gave a party at the Dorchester to celebrate his new acts. “Just coincidentally,” Stigwood would later say, “they were all white acts. And he said to me, ‘You know, we’ve sort of become an all-white label.’ I got someone to call him pretending to be a journalist and say, ‘You’re having a party to celebrate your becoming a white label.’ He hardly ever forgave me.”
While flying together to Paris, Stigwood and Ahmet’s good friend Earl McGrath managed to get their hands on Ahmet’s passport “and put an indecent photograph over his face and he presented it to customs.” On a business trip to Tokyo where the three men shared a suite, Ahmet and McGrath came into Stigwood’s bedroom and threw a bucket of water on him. Stark naked, Stigwood ran across the lounge only to be greeted by a delegation of Japanese senior management recording executives who had come to say goodbye to him. “It was all, ‘Good morning, Mister Stigwood. Good morning.’ They didn’t really bat an eye lid.” And then there was the evening in Los Angeles when Ahmet told Stigwood he was giving a black-tie party for him. Dressed to the nines, Ahmet had his driver take them both to a parking lot where he had paid a collection of seedy derelicts to greet them.
While Stigwood had a well-earned reputation as one of the hardest bargainers in the business, he and Ahmet recognized one another as fellow empire builders and never let their egos get in the way when working together to build an act or sell an album in which they both had a sizable financial stake. To promote “I Feel Free,” Cream’s first single on Atco in America, Ahmet persuaded Stigwood to fly the band to New York to appear at Murray the K’s 1967 Easter show at the RKO Theater on 58th Street. Also featuring The Who, whose next appearance in America was at the Monterey Pop Festival, the show was headlined on alternate nights by Wilson Pickett and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.
On the day after the 1967 Easter Sunday Be-In in Central Park, Eric Clapton went to the Atlantic studios, where he met Ahmet and Nesuhi for the first time and cut “Lawdy Mama,” a song he had first heard Buddy Guy and Junior Wells do on Hoodoo Man Blues. In May, Cream flew back into New York on a Thursday night to record their second album. Before they arrived, Ahmet told Tom Dowd the band had to leave the country on a seven o’clock flight on Sunday night because that was when their visas would expire. In four days with Dowd at the board and Felix Pappalardi producing, Cream transformed “Lawdy Mama” into “Strange Brew.” With lyrics by the English poet Pete Brown, Disraeli Gears (an English roadie’s mistaken pronunciation of the derailleur gears on a racing bicycle that Clapton seized upon for the album title) also featured “Tales of Brave Ulysses” as well as the song that became the album’s monster hit, “Sunshine of Your Love.”
Photographer Don Paulsen, who was present during those sessions, would later say he was “utterly amazed at the degree of input” Ahmet had “in terms of choice of song, tempo, arrangement” with “musicians, who clearly had so much talent but who were equally so genuinely looking to him for guidance.” Having already decided Cream should be Clapton’s band, Ahmet pushed for him rather than Jack Bruce to do most of the singing only to relent when it became apparent to him the bass player was in fact the real leader of the group.
Unable to get Cream airplay in the U.K., Stigwood subsidized the group for a year until they finally broke big on the West Coast after a week-long engagement at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, where they were forced to begin improvising so they could expand their song list to fill two sets a night. While flying together to London, Ahmet, in Stigwood’s words, “dropped a nugget of information to me that Cream and the Bee Gees were 50 percent of his album income at that time.”
Unlike the Bee Gees, who would continue working together throughout their lives, Cream soon began to implode. “Basically, they didn’t like each other,” Stigwood explained. “On their third tour of America, there were rows and fighting every night. Ginger was going to murder Jack. Jack was going to commit suicide. And Eric was dying and saying, ‘Get me out of here. I hate the two of them.’ ”
After Cream released Wheels of Fire, a double album with one live disc and the other a new studio recording that was roundly slammed by critics, Stigwood realized he could no longer keep the group together. Fed up with the drudgery of being out on the road with three musicians who drove audiences wild onstage but could not stand to be in the same room together, Stigwood came up with the idea for the band to do a 1968 farewell tour of the United States followed by two final concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
“Cream was breaking up and Ahmet wanted one more album and they said we hate one another and did not want to do it,” Phil Spector would later tell Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner, “and Ahmet said, ‘Oh no, man, you have to do one more for me. Jerry Wexler has cancer, and he’s dyin’ and he wants to hear one more album from you.’ They go in and make the album and Ahmet says, ‘Jerry Wexler isn’t dyin’, he’s much better, he’s improved.’ ”
During their three years together as a band, Cream sold fifteen million records for Atlantic in America and Ahmet began what became his lifelong friendship with Clapton. After Tom Dowd expressed concern about how much heroin and cocaine the guitarist was using during the recording of Layla with Derek and the Dominos in 1970, Ahmet flew to Miami to see him. Taking Clapton aside, Ahmet talked about Ray Charles and how painful it had been for him to see Charles get caught up in the world of hard drugs. Becoming so emotional he began to cry at one point, Ahmet did all he could to persuade Clapton to deal with his problems but the guitarist continued his descent into hard-core addiction.
By then, Clapton had already formed and walked away from another short-lived supergroup. Just nine weeks after Cream had played its final shows at the end of 1968, the guitarist began jamming in the basement of his home in Surrey with his good friend Steve Winwood, who was then at loose ends during what proved to be a temporary breakup of Traffic, and the two decided to form a band. After Winwood persuaded Clapton to let Ginger Baker join them, they added Family bassist and violin player Ric Grech to the lineup.
With Robert Stigwood and Chris Blackwell working together to smooth out the contractual hassles, the new group made its debut on June 7, 1969, at a massive free concert in London’s Hyde Park. In Stigwood’s words, “We were going to do this free concert in Hyde Park and I was operating on blind faith and that was how they acquired the name. You had to get a council license to appear in Hyde Park and so I applied for ‘Blind Faith.’ I made the name up for the concert and that was it.”
Five weeks later, Blind Faith began touring America in support of an album that would sell half a million copies in a few months. On July 12, as the band was performing at a sold-out Madison Square Garden in New York, Ahmet sat down for an extraordinary dinner meeting in a private room at “21” with Steve Ross and Ted Ashley, the cofounder of the Ashley-Famous Talent Agency. Born Theodore Assofsky in Brooklyn, Ashley had suggested that Ross acquire the Warner Brothers-Seven Arts corporation for $400 million. The deal, which gave Ross full control of Atlantic Records, had been announced just three days earlier.
Ross, whose birth name was Steven Jay Rechnitz, was the son of Jewish immigrants who settled in Brooklyn. After marrying the daughter of a Manhattan funeral parlor owner, he became the head of his father-in-law’s company and used a bank loan to start a successful rental car agency, which he then merged with Kinney Garage, a firm that owned and operated parking lots, to form Kinney National. The company went public in 1962 with a market value of $12.5 million, and Ross then began acquiring a variety of other companies. After he purchased the Ashley-Famous agency for $13 million in November 1967, Ross and Ashley set their sights on a major show business acquisition. Their successful bid for Warner Brothers-Seven Arts was based primarily on the earnings of the company’s very profitable record labels, Warner-Reprise and Atlantic.
When Ahmet learned of the acquisition, he let it be known he would be leaving Atlantic as soon as his two-year management contract ran out. To prevent this from happening, Ashley set up the dinner at “21” where the three men spent six hours discussing Ahmet’s future at the label. At 12:45 in the morning, Ahmet tried to show Ross how little he really knew about the record business by saying, “Look, I’ve got a new group, Blind Faith . . .”
“You mean the guys from the Old Cream and Stevie Winwood, and they just sold out Madison Square Garden without selling a record?” Ross replied. As Ross would later tell the story, Ahmet excitedly leaped to his feet, said, “Yeah, man, you got it!” and then agreed to stay on at Atlantic. While Ross liked Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, he had no idea “who or what Joni Mitchell was” and had been given this vital bit of information the day before by a friend who was a Wall Street entertainment analyst.
For Ahmet, the fact that Ross had gone to the trouble to find out about Blind Faith and then tried to impress him with the knowledge was what poker players call “a tell.” It was a sign Ross knew he could never replace Ahmet and would allow him to continue running Atlantic Records on his own terms. For Ahmet, the truly decisive moment came when Ross pleaded, “Give us a chance,” and then assured Ahmet he would do everything in his power to keep him happy. Ross himself would later call it one of the luckiest days of his life. And so it was that three superstar musicians who made only one record and were soon so at odds with one another that they began traveling to gigs in separate limousines helped shape the future not only of Atlantic but the entire record business as well.
By October 1969, Blind Faith was history. That Steve Ross could never have handled the rock ’n’ roll histrionics Ahmet had already learned to deal with on a daily basis was best illustrated by a story Ahmet loved to tell about what happened after the end of the band’s first and only tour of America. To recover from the grueling ordeal of being out on the road with Blind Faith, Ginger Baker decided to spend a month in Jamaica. Robert Stigwood called Ahmet from London to say that Baker, who owned an Aston Martin in England, wanted to rent one on the island.
Since no one in Jamaica, in Ahmet’s words, “particularly knew what an Aston Martin was,” Ahmet told Stigwood even he could not help him. Nonetheless, Ahmet got in touch with Chris Blackwell, whose cousin arranged for a friend who owned a Ferrari to let Baker drive the car for a month, provided Ahmet would pay for any damages, which he agreed to do. A few nights later, Ahmet “got a call in the middle of the night from Ginger Baker who was ranting and raving, screaming down the phone at me . . . ‘I don’t want a fucking wop car!’ ”
Politely, Ahmet explained there were no other cars of this kind to rent in Jamaica but “he just kept yelling and screaming at me down the phone.” Calling Stigwood in London, Ahmet said they might as well ship Baker his car from London. “So they put the car on the plane and sent it to Jamaica but somehow the shipment got lost and then we had to trace it. It landed in Atlanta instead of Jamaica and finally the car got to Jamaica two days before he was leaving. He was furious.”
The first time Ahmet had ever met the “hotheaded” drummer, Baker had told him, “I’m a communist. You understand? You keep that in mind, and you’ll understand a lot about the way I behave.” When Ahmet next saw Baker, the musician apologized for his behavior in Jamaica. “Well, that’s okay,” Ahmet said. “I kept one thing in mind that you told me some time ago and I didn’t get angry.” When Baker asked what that was, Ahmet replied, “Remember you told me you were a communist? I just kept that in mind.”
While this was the punch line Ahmet always used when he told the story, Jac Holzman would later say the car Baker had wanted in Jamaica was in fact a Jensen Interceptor and that when Sheldon Vogel, who handled the finances at Atlantic, brought Ahmet a check for $10,000 to cover its shipping costs to Jamaica, Ahmet said, “Sheldon, just because I asked for the check doesn’t mean you should bring it to me.” As Holzman would later say, “That’s the real end of the story. He didn’t want to give the money to Ginger at all.”
Despite Ahmet’s deep connection to the music scene in London, it was Jerry Wexler who signed the English band that went on to sell the most records for Atlantic. Wexler had first met “Little” Jimmy Page when Bert Berns brought the guitarist to New York to play on R&B sessions. In the fall of 1968, along with Tom Dowd and the brilliant arranger Arif Mardin, Wexler was producing Dusty Springfield’s iconic Dusty in Memphis album when the English pop singer told him Page was forming a band in London known as the New Yardbirds.
While Wexler remembered Page had “played his ass off” while recording for Berns and also knew John Bonham, another member of the new group, was “a hell of a drummer,” he had never heard of lead singer Robert Plant. Based solely on Dusty Springfield’s recommendation, Wexler decided to pursue them. That both Clive Davis and Mo Ostin were also trying to sign the band only served to increase Wexler’s interest and he arranged to meet with their manager in New York.
Bringing with him from London the tapes of what would become the band’s first album, Peter Grant sat down with Wexler in his office at Atlantic. A hulking giant of a man who stood well over six feet tall and weighed more than 250 pounds, Grant sported a fierce horseshoe mustache that along with his prodigious gut made him look like the villainous professional wrestler he had once been. Stealing a beat on the competition, Wexler offered Grant a $75,000 advance as well as a five-year recording contract that the manager quickly accepted.
The band’s American lawyer then called Wexler to say he could have the world rights for another $35,000. Asking the lawyer to let him think about it, Wexler offered the English rights to Roland Rennie, the head of Polydor Records, for $20,000 only to have him pass. In what turned out to be one of the best deals in the history of the record business, Wexler bought the world rights for $35,000.
Much like Ahmet, who no longer had to worry about how much it would cost to sign a new act, Wexler made the deal because the money was not coming out of his pocket. By then, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, John Paul Jones, and Robert Plant had decided to call themselves Led Zeppelin, a name Page had come up with while trying to persuade guitarist Jeff Beck as well as The Who’s bassist John Entwhistle and drummer Keith Moon to join him only to have Entwhistle say the aggregation might go down like a “lead zeppelin,” a term he used to describe a bad show. Grant then suggested Page omit the “a” in “Lead” so “thick Americans” would not pronounce it “Leed.”
On November 23, 1968, Atlantic issued a press release announcing that while “the exact terms of the deal are secret,” the label had signed “the hot new English group, Led Zeppelin” to “one of the most substantial deals Atlantic has ever made.” As the release also noted, “Top English and American rock musicians who have heard the tracks have called Led Zeppelin the next group to reach heights achieved by Cream and Hendrix.”
Unbeknownst to Wexler, Chris Blackwell had already “shaken hands with Peter Grant on Zeppelin for $25,000 an album for the world excluding America and Canada.” As Blackwell recalled, “It was a handshake deal but I was dealing with Peter Grant and so it wasn’t a deal until it really was a deal. And to tell you the truth, I’m glad I didn’t get them because it wouldn’t have worked for us at Island. Too dark. I couldn’t have dealt with it.”
At a time in the record business when every manager personified the act they represented, Grant had already acquired a reputation as a fearsome figure who would stop at nothing to protect his artists. “I signed Led Zeppelin,” Wexler would later say, “and then I had nothing to do with them. Absolutely nothing. Ahmet took over their care and cleaning. I don’t think I could have tolerated them. I got along fine with Peter Grant. But I knew he was an animal.”
To say that Ahmet and Peter Grant had virtually nothing in common except for Led Zeppelin would be a major understatement. Before forsaking his studies at the age of thirteen to become a sheet metal worker, Grant had attended the Ingram Road School in southeast London. As Phil Carson, who played bass with Dusty Springfield before becoming Atlantic’s label manager in England and then the manager of Yes, recalled, “I went to St. Joseph’s College which was not five miles from the Ingram Road School where Peter Grant went. His school was real working-class and the Kray brothers [notorious English criminals] had gone there. Peter Grant was like them although he never did get involved in any crime.”
When Carson was eleven years old, he witnessed a fight between the St. Joseph’s College rugby team and “the Ingram Road boys. The entire first fifteen showed up, two or three years older than the nine or ten Ingram Road boys, and they got fucking slaughtered. Grant was in the fight and they came fully armed with sawed-off billiard cues which was not exactly the Queensbury rules and they just beat the shit out of the St. Joseph’s college fifteen. It was incredible.”
After doing his national service, Grant became a doorman and bouncer at a coffee bar where pop sensations Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, and Tommy Steele got their start. At the suggestion of the Australian-born professional wrestler who co-owned the coffee bar, Grant began wrestling on television in England and then became a bit-part actor, stuntman, and body double in movies and television. Turning his attention to the music business, Grant quickly became the most physically imposing and dangerously explosive manager in rock. After Grant had taken the Yardbirds on their final tour of America, Jimmy Page chose him to manage Zeppelin.
Fifteen days before their first album was released, the band was already on tour in the United States, making their American debut in Denver on December 26, 1968. A smash hit, Led Zeppelin soon hit the Top Ten, where it remained for the next seventy-three weeks, eventually selling eight million copies in America. Hailed as the inventors of heavy metal music, Zeppelin played electric blues infused with elements of folk and Celtic music in a manner no one had ever heard before.
As Bill Curbishley, The Who’s long-term manager who also guided the solo careers of Page and Robert Plant, would later say, “Having worked with all these musicians, the difference between The Who and Led Zeppelin was that The Who never gave a bad show. They were always either good or absolutely amazing. Whereas Zeppelin were either awful or absolutely brilliantly amazing. There was no in-between. It had a lot to do with whatever condition they were in when they went onstage. It was also a different dynamic. Zeppelin was really about sex and The Who was more about intellectual frustration and aggression.”
Once Zeppelin hit it big in America, Ahmet made it his business to form a close relationship with both Peter Grant and Jimmy Page. In the words of Lisa Robinson, the rock journalist who toured with Zeppelin throughout the 1970s, “Even though Robert Plant was the singer, the talker, the charmer, and more extroverted, it was initially Jimmy Page’s band—he put it together with the help of Peter Grant. Ahmet always knew where the power was and so his focus was always slightly more on Peter and Jimmy than Robert.”
Confirming that “in the beginning, it was all Jimmy,” Curbishley would later say, “Then gradually Plant established himself in terms of writing songs, helping with the melodies, and writing all the lyrics, and it became more of a partnership and a democracy and nobody understood that better than Ahmet. He had this ability to deal with the pair of them but as time went by, the divisions became deeper and he was struggling a bit in terms of trying to get them to record.”
At the start, in Phil Carson’s words, “Zeppelin was all about boys having fun with no darkness to it whatever and Peter Grant in some ways the ringleader.” The band soon acquired a reputation that became the gold standard for outrageous behavior on the road. Doing massive amounts of drugs and alcohol, the individual members of Led Zeppelin despoiled groupies as no band ever had before. In the words of Mario Medious, who began his career at Atlantic as an accountant only to transform himself into “The Big M,” a fast-talking FM promotion man, “Zeppelin had crazy hard-core groupies like the Plaster Casters who would give them head in a phone booth or at the dinner table. Guys in the band would say, ‘I just got plated, man.’ I didn’t know what plated was. ‘You were sitting at table, how could you get plated?’ ‘She plated me while I ate.’ ”
Becoming a devotee of Aleister Crowley, the occult philosopher, adventurer, and practitioner of black magic known as “the wickedest man in the world,” Page dabbled in Satanism. Emulating the man he called “a misunderstood genius,” the guitarist used some of his newfound wealth to purchase Boleskine House, Crowley’s former estate near Loch Ness in Scotland.
At the end of Zeppelin’s second American tour, drummer John Bonham, known for good reason as “The Beast,” attacked rock journalist Ellen Sander in the band’s dressing room and had to be pulled off her by Grant. In a backstage trailer at the Oakland Coliseum in 1977, Grant and the band’s huge bodyguard beat one of Bill Graham’s security guards so badly for supposedly having spoken rudely to Grant’s son that the promoter had both men arrested.
As Mario Medious, who endured thirty-seven one-nighters with Zeppelin on the band’s second American tour, would later say, “Ahmet and Peter Grant ended up being tight but they had fights all the time about money because Led Zeppelin innovated how bands got paid and controlled everything—what the album cover was like, everything. Grant was always complaining about something. That was why Atlantic sent me on the road with them. To cool him out.”
Despite their differences, in Curbishley’s words, “Ahmet had the talent to be able to talk to Peter Grant. He stood up to Peter and was not at all intimidated by him. Grant knew who Ahmet was and in the end, he owed Ahmet. It’s okay to come in with a great album and all that but you cannot minimize what Ahmet put behind that band.”
Whenever Led Zeppelin was on the road in America, Ahmet would appear in the band’s dressing room before a show. Welcomed by one and all as an honored guest, he would partake happily of whatever was going around and then fly with the band on its private plane to the next gig. As Jerry Wexler would later say, “Ahmet was the guy who went to the concerts and dealt with the managers. He plunged into it heart and soul. He became their friend and it was those efforts that made Atlantic a monster company.”
Spending little or no time with the band in the studio, neither Ahmet nor Wexler ever knew what kind of material Zeppelin was recording until the group actually submitted its new album. When the band delivered Led Zeppelin II in the fall of 1969, Wexler was forced to “throw out a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of records because the bass was so heavy and overmodulated that the needle skipped. We had to have it redone so it was playable.”
Two years after a shortened version of Zeppelin’s only single, “Whole Lotta Love,” became a Top Ten hit, the band released Led Zeppelin IV. Featuring “Stairway to Heaven,” the most frequently played song in the history of FM classic rock radio, the album eventually sold 23 million copies. Over the course of its career, Led Zeppelin sold more than 110 million albums in America and at least twice that all over the world.
Eleven years after first playing together in the basement of a record store on Gerrard Street in London, Led Zeppelin’s career came to an end. After consuming forty shots of vodka in a twenty-four-hour period, John Bonham asphyxiated on his own vomit and died in his sleep on September 25, 1980, at the age of thirty-two. “It all fell apart after Bonham died,” Curbishley recalled, “because Robert Plant felt they shouldn’t carry on. They tried with a couple of different drummers but it never really worked and so Robert went off to do a solo album.” When Ahmet decided in 1984 to record a collection of his favorite songs from the 1950s, he coproduced the Honeydrippers album with Robert Plant, and the singer’s version of Phil Phillips’s 1959 hit “Sea of Love” became his biggest-selling single.
Despite Curbishley’s continuing efforts to persuade Page and Plant to work together again, “Page was drinking a lot throughout that whole period and he used to close down. He was very insular. The bonding Plant was trying to achieve with him never really happened and it hasn’t happened as of today. However much I still urge Page to call Robert, go have some lunch, just hang out, he can’t do it. They’re two different animals. Totally different animals.”
The demise of Led Zeppelin also effectively ended Peter Grant’s role as the most feared manager in rock. “When Grant was really in a bad state,” Curbishley said, “Ahmet did a lot to shore him up and cover his ass. He went to see Grant in his house in England and sat down for twelve hours but Grant wouldn’t come out of the bedroom. Towards the end, it was quite insane and Ahmet never got that far with him because it all spiraled into madness.” Peter Grant died of a heart attack at the age of sixty on November 21, 1995. In Curbishley’s words, “The lifestyle destroyed him.”
Despite how much time he had spent on the road with Led Zeppelin and how close he had become with Grant, Ahmet never let himself be drawn into the vortex of madness that was the band’s stock-in-trade. Recalling his initial meeting with Ahmet in 1969, Robert Plant would say, “Right in the middle of the eye of the storm was this absolutely elite gentleman, the master of serenity, as much at home with the backstage cavorting of Led Zeppelin as he was with the politesse of high society. We had some memorable nights together; I wish I could remember them. He was, to me, an oasis and a model—how to be settled in the midst of all this madness, how to know when to get excited and when not. Of course, he’s been practicing for ages.”