“It was ’69 or ’70, and I wasn’t aware that the Rolling Stones contract with London Records was running out . . . One morning there’s a knock on my bungalow door at the hotel where I’m staying, and it’s a British roadie who tells me that Mick says it’s OK if I want to come down to the studio where they are recording. I thank him very much, but I don’t go because I have something else I have to do that night. The next morning a knock on my door again, same roadie, he says, ‘Hey, listen, man. Mick wants you to come down,’ and the next night, I did. They gave me a tremendous reception, all the guys in the band. I leave the studio, and I go out with Bill Drake, who was a very powerful man in radio. He liked me because I drank with him. Well that night we drank a couple of bottles of whiskey together. I tell him I’ve been to the studio where the Stones are recording, and Mick Jagger says he wants to talk to me, and I have a plan to meet him at the Whisky at midnight. Drake says, ‘No kidding? Mick Jagger? Terrific.’ By this time I’m getting very tired from the jet lag I had the day before and all the drinking. Anyway, we go to the Whisky. I’ve called ahead for a table, and Bill had a couple of girls, the four of us are sitting at the table, and I have another drink. Chuck Berry is onstage, and Mick arrives at twelve-thirty. I introduce him to Drake and the girls, and Mick sits down and starts telling me about their recording plans. He starts talking, and I doze off. I can remember this girl shaking me, going, ‘Wake up, wake up. It’s Mick Jagger. He’s telling you something important.’ Mick hates people who are into high pressure, but this was the opposite. Here he was telling me that the Rolling Stones have decided to sign with Atlantic, and I had fallen asleep.”
—Ahmet Ertegun
If only it had been this simple, Ahmet would not have spent the next eighteen months of his life working harder than he ever had before to convince Mick Jagger that the Rolling Stones did in fact belong on Atlantic Records. While the band would never earn nearly as much money for the label as Led Zeppelin, Ahmet saw the Stones as “the most desirable act in the business,” the jewel in the crown that would confirm beyond all doubt that Atlantic was the number one record company in the world.
Ahmet had first met the band on October 23, 1964, at photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s apartment at 333 Park Avenue South during a gala twenty-fourth birthday party for socialite Baby Jane Holzer. Two years later, Ahmet ran into Jagger again at a press party for Bobby Darin in London. In Ahmet’s words, “We had a few laughs at that time but then I lost contact with him. Not for any specific reason but then Mick called me up when the Stones’ contract with English Decca had about a year to go and they had decided to make a change.”
The dark side of the original British Invasion, the Rolling Stones’ distinctly dangerous onstage presence, sexually suggestive lyrics, and reputation for antisocial behavior caused them to be perceived in America as the antidote to the Beatles. It was not until “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” hit the top of the charts in 1965 that they achieved the superstar status in the U.S. they had already been accorded in England.
During the last week in October 1969 when Ahmet sat down with Jagger at the Whisky, the Stones were in Los Angeles preparing for their first American tour in three years. In July, Brian Jones, the founder of the group, had drowned in his swimming pool under mysterious circumstances shortly after having been asked to leave the band. The Stones had then performed with his replacement, ex-Bluesbreakers lead guitarist Mick Taylor, at a massive free concert in London’s Hyde Park.
After being busted for drug possession at an LSD party at Keith Richards’s country home in England in 1967, Jagger and Richards had been tried and convicted only to have their sentences overturned by a higher court. In the process, they had become counterculture heroes. With the Beatles no longer touring, the Stones were about to stake their claim in America as the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band.
After completing a very successful three-week, fifteen-city tour that featured three sold-out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the Stones flew into Atlanta on December 2, 1969. The band then journeyed to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where they recorded Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Got to Move,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Wild Horses.” Ahmet, who rarely spent time in what had become Jerry Wexler’s home studio, was there to greet them.
Looking incredibly serious and focused in an immaculate dark suit, white shirt, and tie, Ahmet can be seen in a photograph talking intently to Jagger. In full hippie mode, shaggy-haired Jagger sports a studded leather horse collar around his neck. On his head, he wears a top hat fashioned from a Union Jack. While the pair seem like ambassadors from two different worlds, they spoke a common language based on more than their shared love of the blues.
Despite having released fourteen albums and twenty-nine singles in America and England, the Stones were still essentially broke because of the disastrous management deals they had signed first with Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton and then Allen Klein. Jagger, who had attended the London School of Economics, was by then already on his way to becoming a consummate businessman who understood the inner workings of the record industry as well as Ahmet.
On December 6, 1969, as the Rolling Stones were performing at a huge free concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang who had been hired to provide security in return for cases of beer killed an eighteen-year-old black man named Meredith Hunter. Less than four months after the media had proclaimed the Woodstock Arts and Music Festival as the birth of the counterculture in America, the disastrous free concert at Altamont became its death knell. The event also served to increase the Stones’ notoriety in America by geometric proportions.
“Ahmet got involved with the Stones right after Altamont,” Peter Rudge, who managed the band’s next tour of America, would later say. “That was a crossroads for the Stones. They could have gone any way after that point but Ahmet’s courtship and signing of them took them from being one of the better rock bands to writing their own role in history. And Ahmet was embedded through all that behind the scenes.”
Despite the role Ahmet would eventually play in the Stones’ future, Mick Jagger was not about to allow the band to sign with Atlantic until he was certain no one could offer them a better deal. Bob Krasnow, the head of Blue Thumb Records in Los Angeles, was one of many record executives who did their best to convince Jagger that his label was the best fit for the Stones. As Krasnow would later say, “Mick and I were sitting in my office and I was pitching him like crazy and I said, ‘Look, man, the world is changing and we need to stick together in America to make sure the world changes for the best.’ I was probably stoned out of my mind and I got on one of my esoteric speeches and I fucked the whole thing up. I thought Mick had a social conscience. He said, ‘Hey, I’m a tourist here, man,’ and that was the last I ever heard from him.”
Krasnow also tried to forge an alliance to sign the band with Marshall Chess, who had become president of the label founded by his father and uncle only to leave the company after it was acquired by a conglomerate. Deciding it would be better if they remained friends rather than try to work together, Chess asked Krasnow for permission to contact Jagger on his own and Krasnow gave him the singer’s phone number in London.
Chess called Jagger in London and then flew there to meet with him only to be told the singer “was in Ireland writing when what he really had was some hot pussy there.” A few days later, the two men sat down to talk in Jagger’s living room. Jagger then took Chess to meet the rest of the Stones in their East London rehearsal room. Two weeks later, Chess received a telegram instructing him to come to London, where Prince Rupert Lowenstein, the merchant banker Jagger had asked to look into the band’s tangled finances, authorized the twenty-seven-year-old son of Leonard Chess to begin formal negotiations for a new record deal with the understanding that once the Stones had their own label, Marshall Chess would run it for them.
As Chess, who had known Ahmet since he and Jerry Wexler had attended his bar mitzvah in 1955, would later say, “We talked about numerous labels but the Stones wanted to be on Atlantic. That was by far our first choice because Mick and Keith wanted it and I loved Ahmet. But we did negotiate with two or three other majors, including Chris Blackwell at Island. But even before money was discussed, Atlantic was where they wanted to be.”
By this point, Ahmet had been courting the Stones so ardently that Jerry Greenberg, who was then just beginning his career at Atlantic as a promotion man, recalled, “I used to ask Jerry, ‘Where’s Ahmet?’ and he would always say, ‘With Mick.’ He followed Mick around for a year and maybe desperate is the wrong word but Ahmet wanted the Rolling Stones. Maybe because Jerry had signed Zeppelin. Maybe he wanted to have the biggest company in the world. Maybe because he loved Mick Jagger.”
On July 31, 1970, the contract Allen Klein had negotiated for the Stones with Decca Records expired. Jagger was still considering his options a month later when Ahmet and Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman sat down together at nine in the morning in the Oliver Messel Suite of the Dorchester Hotel in London to discuss their plans to record the upcoming Isle of Wight Festival. Ahmet, who had been out so late with Jagger the night before that his driver was asleep at the wheel of the company Rolls-Royce parked outside the hotel, called the singer to say what a wonderful time they’d had together, a point with which Jagger readily agreed.
Having already spent an enormous amount of time and money courting Jagger while also cultivating a “marvelous relationship” with Prince Rupert Lowenstein, “a terrific person who quickly learned all the devious ways of the music business,” Ahmet told Jagger the time had come for them all to sit down and make a deal. When Jagger said he would be happy to do so as soon as he had spoken with Clive Davis at Columbia, “all the color drained out of Ahmet’s face” and the call came to an abrupt end. In Holzman’s words, “Ahmet had this conversation with Mick and he was sort of bellying up to him about ‘Wasn’t that a wonderful time we had last night’ and then Mick said, ‘We’ll talk to you as soon as we talk to Clive Davis,’ and Ahmet was so obsessed he could not focus on our discussion.”
Fighting to control his anger, Ahmet picked up the phone and “very deliberately” dialed Jagger’s number. “Mick,” he said. “I can understand you want to talk to Clive Davis, and you should. But I want you to know I can only make one Stones-sized deal this year, and it’s either you”—and here Ahmet paused—“or Paul Revere and the Raiders.” He then hung up the phone. Thirty seconds later, the phone rang. Ahmet did not pick it up. Nor did he bother doing so as the phone rang constantly for the next forty-five minutes.
As Holzman would later say, “I have no idea what Paul Revere and the Raiders were doing then but the point was that by picking them, he was fucking with Mick’s head and yanking his chain. If he had picked a contemporary artist, Mick might have believed it.” But then as Holzman would later write, “Ahmet was the greatest poker player in the business.”
Rupert Lowenstein then contacted Clive Davis. When Davis spoke to Jagger over the phone, he told him his style was different from Ahmet’s and that while he sometimes traveled, he could not spend a lot of time socializing with him. Jagger said his decision was strictly business and would not be based on social considerations. Because he knew “Columbia was the best company in the business” and was also well aware of Davis’s reputation, Jagger encouraged Davis to make a bid for the Stones but told him to talk to Lowenstein about the actual numbers.
According to Davis, Lowenstein then told him the Stones wanted an advance of between $5 and $6 million (most likely over the length of a contract for five or six albums) as well as “a staggering royalty rate.” As the band was then selling between 750,000 and a million units per album, less than half of what Columbia artists Chicago, Santana, and Blood, Sweat & Tears were selling and nowhere near Simon and Garfunkel’s massive sales, Davis feared that if he paid the Stones what they were asking, it would cost him an unimaginable sum of money to retain his more successful acts when their contracts came up for renewal.
Deciding the stakes were too high for him, Davis opted not to meet the Stones’ demands. Davis may have also known that with Ahmet in the game, he stood no real chance of signing the group but was only being used to help push up the final price. As Stones lead guitarist Keith Richards would later say, “I think we were fishing but at the same time, the idea of Atlantic Records loomed large on our English horizon. Just the idea of being on Atlantic blew us away. We’d already died and gone to heaven, man. I didn’t really warm up to Clive too much but I was attracted to Atlantic because of their knowledge of black music and how they knew how to record. Ahmet was chasing Mick but that was the obvious tail to chase, right? I was quite willing to let Mick carry on and do the main business but I think we were both saying, ‘Atlantic Records sounds right to us.’ ”
Ahmet knew the band was leaning toward signing with him but Clive Davis’s entry into the race only served to up the ante. As Ahmet would later say, “Whenever I saw Rupert or Mick with someone else, my heart sank. It was a painful, ecstatic courtship.” Increasing his already dogged pursuit of the Stones, Ahmet arranged one of the more surreal high-level record business meetings of all time. Bringing Lowenstein and Marshall Chess together with Steve Ross at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Ahmet stood with them in the shallow end of the hotel pool explaining just how much he could do for the Stones with Ross’s backing if the band signed with Atlantic.
Along with Atlantic lawyer Mike Mayer and Sheldon Vogel, the label’s chief financial officer, Ahmet then sat down with Chess, Lowenstein, and their lawyer to hammer out the fine points of the deal in the conference room at the Atlantic Records office on 61st Street and Broadway in New York. As Chess would later say, “I felt I knew more than Ahmet about what it cost to press a record and how much profit was in it because we had pressed everything ourselves at Chess. We got a dollar an album from Atlantic which was the biggest deal ever at that time and a million-dollar advance. Which would be like five million today. Ahmet was patting his head with his white Sulka handkerchief because he was shvitzing when I said, ‘It costs eighteen cents to press a record. Give me a fucking break.’ It was not easy but the deal went down in two days and I was thrilled.”
On April 1, 1971, a year and a half after Ahmet had fallen asleep on Mick Jagger in the Whisky, the Rolling Stones signed with Atlantic. The monster deal Marshall Chess had cut in New York led to the creation of Rolling Stones Records and guaranteed the band an advance of a million dollars per album for five albums against a royalty rate of more than 10 percent a record. As Ahmet would later say, “I think Jagger would have liked to be on a funky label. I think Jagger would have liked to be on Excello. We were the closest he could get to Excello and still get five million dollars.” A huge deal by any standard that no other label was willing to match, it was also a contract Ahmet would have never signed if he had been spending his own money.
Quickly, Ahmet assumed the same role with the Stones he had already played over the years with other great Atlantic artists whose music he instinctively understood. Andy Johns, who was then twenty years old and just beginning his career as a recording engineer with the band, first met Ahmet at Olympic Studios in London. As Johns was mixing “Bitch,” a track from the Stones’ debut album on Atlantic, “a very suave old guy I didn’t know came in. It was Ahmet, who had probably just had his hair cut in France and lunch in Budapest.”
Sitting down at the back of the control room, Ahmet watched in silence for a while as Johns, in his words, “was struggling a bit with the mix. Then he said, ‘Hey, kid! What you oughta do is add a little bottom to the guitars and turn the bass up.’ He was a bit of an authority figure so I did what he said. Bingo! The thing jelled. He got up and wandered off and I said to Keith, ‘Who the fuck is that?’ Keith said, ‘You don’t know who that is? That’s Ahmet Er-te-gun! And he’s been making hit records since before you were born.’ The reason the Stones signed with Atlantic was because they were so impressed with Ahmet. He could hang out with a prime minister in the morning and do blow with the fucking bass player in the evening.”
Having grown up in England listening to Chuck Berry on Chess as well as Ray Charles and Ruth Brown on Atlantic, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards now had their own label headed by Leonard Chess’s son that would be distributed by the man who had recorded so many of the artists they idolized. That the Stones had done the right thing by deciding to go with Atlantic was confirmed when Ahmet visited Jagger after the deal had finally been signed. As Jagger would later say, “It was in my house in London and he’d drunk so much bourbon that when we actually shook hands on the deal, the chair fell back and he fell on the floor.” In what seemed to all concerned like a record business marriage made in heaven, the honeymoon was about to begin.
When it came to celebrating good fortune, most especially where his new darlings the Rolling Stones were concerned, no one could compare to Ahmet. Deciding to throw a gala party for the band on April 17, 1971, to announce the release of the first single from their debut album on Atlantic, he flew with a small group of traveling companions to the south of France, where the Stones were just beginning what would become their mad and calamitous year of living in tax exile.
In every sense, the trip marked the start of Ahmet’s ascension to authentic full-blown rock royalty. As Stones tour manager Peter Rudge would later say, “During this period of his life, Ahmet was as high-profile as he had ever been and never, ever alone. I only ever saw him alone once at a meeting at Atlantic during one of those rare occasions when he was in the office. When he would travel, he was the first Puff Daddy. He always had a posse and you could see him coming from miles away.”
As Ahmet boarded the 747 that would take him to France, he was accompanied by David Geffen, Stephen Stills, Jerry Greenberg, and the writer George Trow, who was then researching his profile of Ahmet, which would not appear in The New Yorker magazine for another seven years. Sipping a Chivas and soda on ice as he sat in the first-class cabin, Ahmet listened as Jerry Greenberg pitched him on signing a band called Pacific Gas & Electric, who were then on Columbia. When Greenberg told him how much the deal would cost, Ahmet said, “I don’t think that figure appeals to me.”
Knowing Trow was observing his every move and would be writing about him for a publication read by those whom he valued most, Ahmet promptly transformed himself into a rock ’n’ roll version of Alexander Woollcott by telling the writer, “It is amusing, I think. For all their youthful charm, that group has as quotable a price as the utility for which they are whimsically named.”
Having always brilliantly controlled his own image in the press, Ahmet then stage-managed the interview Trow did with David Geffen during the flight. In Geffen’s words, “Ahmet said to me, ‘Make sure you only say good things.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you want me to tell him?’ He said, ‘I don’t care. Make it up.’ So I told him this story about how Ahmet had loaned me $50,000 and wouldn’t let me pay it back. Anyone who knows Ahmet knows that’s a made-up story. Later, Ahmet and I were having a big fight and he said to me, ‘You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve! I gave you fifty thousand dollars.’ I said, ‘Ahmet, I made that story up for George Trow.’ ”
Much as he had done with Geffen, Ahmet had invited Greenberg on the trip for a specific reason. A former musician who as a promotion man based in New Haven, Connecticut, had demonstrated an incredible knack for breaking records in his local market, Greenberg had been hired at Atlantic by Jerry Wexler in 1967. He had made his bones at the label by persuading Wexler to pay $5,000 for a hit record that had come to him in the mail entitled “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell & the Drells.
Greenberg soon learned that Wexler, the toughest task master in the business, expected him to be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. One year, Wexler ordered Greenberg into the office on Thanksgiving so he could do the mailing of a Wilson Pickett record being released the next day. In Greenberg’s words, “Wexler was a maniac, but a great maniac. . . . Once he called my house on Yom Kippur, wanting to discuss an urgent business matter. My wife said I was in synagogue. ‘What’s the number there? I’ll have him paged.’ ” As Greenberg recalled, “I was in B’nai Jacob in New Haven. It was a Conservative synogogue but they still wouldn’t have taken the call. Working for Jerry Wexler was like going into the Marines. You either came out a sergeant or they found you dead in a fucking swamp.”
While Greenberg’s prior contact with Ahmet at the label had been so limited that he initially thought Ahmet ran Atco while Wexler was in charge of Atlantic, Ahmet had summoned Greenberg to his office some weeks earlier to say, “I’m signing the Rolling Stones, we’re going to make the announcement next month in France, I want you to come with me, you’re the only one I want Mick Jagger to talk to when I’m not here.” When Ahmet learned Mica would be coming from Paris to join him in Cannes, he instructed Greenberg to bring his wife along and then took them both to Paris, where Greenberg had never been, for the weekend.
By taking Jerry Greenberg with him to the south of France, Ahmet effectively ended Greenberg’s term of service as Wexler’s second-in-command. From now on, Greenberg would be running the day-to-day operations at Atlantic, thereby allowing Ahmet to continue doing just as he pleased without having to worry about concerns that no longer really interested him.
Then twenty-eight years old and still functioning as Ahmet’s eager and loyal protégé, David Geffen had come along so he could get the inside track on managing the Stones’ next tour of America, a position coveted by a host of other music business heavies. By providing Geffen with unlimited access to Rupert Lowenstein and Mick Jagger during their visit, Ahmet was doing Geffen a favor that would also benefit him. At loose ends now that CSN&Y had broken up, Stephen Stills, whom Trow would later describe as “the odd man out” in the group, was there simply because he wanted to hang out with the Stones.
In the good old days when Ahmet and Jerry Wexler had set out on the road together in search of new talent and good times, the two men had been absolute peers united by their love for black roots music. Having ascended to brand-new heights by bringing the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band to Atlantic, Ahmet was now traveling like a potentate surrounded by courtiers whose music business survival depended in large part on his continuing favor. Nor was it an accident that Wexler himself was not around. For reasons best known only to himself, Ahmet had not invited him.
Although Geffen had already proven his own music business acumen by selling Tunafish Music, the publishing company he had formed for Laura Nyro, for $4 million, he was then still completely in thrall to Ahmet and happy just to spend time with him and Mica in the south of France. Nonetheless, Ahmet could not resist the urge to occasionally remind him of his proper place in the pecking order. When Geffen asked if there were any recording studios in France, Ahmet loftily replied, “France is like Brooklyn. They have everything.” In Geffen’s words, “It didn’t feel like a put-down. The cutting remarks were part of Ahmet’s sense of humor and not particular to me. He would also say things about Robert Stigwood, whom he considered a close friend and a very important manager. It was part of his nature and character. Ahmet was a complicated guy.”
Nor could Ahmet contain himself as he and Mica sat down with Rupert Lowenstein and Geffen for dinner that evening in the Hotel Majestic on La Croisette in Cannes. When Lowenstein, a descendant of a royal family that traced its lineage back to the Holy Roman Empire, suggested it was time for them all to go to the party for the Stones, Ahmet said there was no need to do so yet because he and Lowenstein were the hosts. When Lowenstein told Ahmet that Jagger had recently given a big party in London only to arrive there four hours late, Ahmet told him, “You’re not a rock-and-roll star, and the sooner you realize that, the happier you’ll be.”
By the time Ahmet arrived at the party at the Port Pierre Canto Club, for which Atlantic was footing the bill, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Mick Taylor were already there with their wives and girlfriends. As Ahmet and Jagger embraced like the close friends and business associates they had now become, Ahmet said, “We have to do the whole thing, don’t we?” Jagger replied, “If we had taps on our shoes, we could really do a number.”
Both men knew the real purpose of the evening was to jump-start the sales of the Stones’ new single as well as the album from which it came. While the party itself turned out to be a nonevent, even though Jagger did throw a glass of wine into the face of a photographer who had been bothering him all night, the English rock writer Nik Cohn accurately described what was really going on that evening by telling Trow, “Ahmet is the King of Rock and Roll. Ahmet is more important than Jagger . . . and more interesting. . . . Ahmet is really a figure, and Jagger is nothing more than a little rock-and-roll singer. And what is a rock-and-roll singer in the end?”
It was a question Keith Richards, Jagger’s boon companion and songwriting partner, might have been hard pressed to answer. Having left the yacht club early in the evening to find his beloved dog Okie, Richards would later explain his sudden departure by saying, “That was my only friend at the party, man.” Along with his companion, the Italian-born actress Anita Pallenberg, Richards then joined Ahmet, Stills, and Charlie Watts at bassist Bill Wyman’s house in Grasse for the real party, which went on all night. As Ahmet was being driven back to the Hotel Majestic in his limousine at dawn, he leaned forward and with great aplomb told the driver, “We are very restless people. Please drive faster.”
Ahmet’s unwavering faith in the Rolling Stones was amply rewarded when their first single on Atlantic, “Brown Sugar,” a song Jagger had originally wanted to call “Black Pussy” and which the band had first performed at Altamont, went to number one in America. The cover of Sticky Fingers, conceived by Andy Warhol for $30,000, featured a real zipper on a pair of very tight jeans worn by actor Joe Dallesandro. Because the zipper warped the first fifty thousand copies of the record when they were stacked, the zipper then had to be lowered to half-mast so the album could be shipped. The album became the Rolling Stones’ biggest seller to this point in time.
On May 27, it replaced Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s live 4 Way Street double album as the number one album on the Billboard charts and stayed there for three weeks before eventually going triple platinum (selling three million copies). For the first time in the band’s history, an album by the Rolling Stones topped both the British and American charts at the same time. Proving yet again how good he was at this business, Ahmet’s daring gamble had paid off immediately. Atlantic easily recouped the million-dollar advance he had given the Stones for Sticky Fingers.
For Jagger and Richards, the bad news was that because they had written and recorded a good deal of the album while still under contract to Allen Klein, their former manager owned the copyrights to many of the songs and so they did not earn the far more generous royalties on this material they would have been paid by Atlantic. The obvious solution was for Jagger and Richards to begin writing and recording new material for what was now their eagerly awaited second album on Atlantic. As Ahmet soon learned, this was a problem not even he could solve.
Despite their shared history and how hard they had worked together to ensure the success of the band, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had always been two birds of a completely different feather. While the ongoing tension between them had helped propel the band to superstar status, their widely divergent lifestyles now began taking precedence over their careers and the two found themselves at odds as never before. Ahmet did all he could to help speed the apparently endless process of recording their new album, but even he was forced to concede that in the Rolling Stones, he had finally met his match.
During the recording of Sticky Fingers, Keith Richards’s drug problems had become so severe that he did not even attend the session during which “Moonlight Mile,” the final track on the album, had been recorded. By the time the Stones found themselves living in luxury in the south of France in the spring of 1971, Richards and Anita Pallenberg, by now the parents of a young son, had both just managed to stop using heroin on a regular basis. Living like outlaws in a sumptous villa overlooking the sea that soon became a riotous jet-set commune filled with a motley crew of beautiful people and high-born hangers-on, they had little use for the far more sedate manner in which Mick Jagger was now conducting himself and nothing at all in common with his new girlfriend, the Nicaraguan-born Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias.
Interceding in the life of the preeminent artist on his label in a manner no other record executive would have ever dared to do, Ahmet had actually helped bring the two together. Before the Stones decamped for the south of France, Ahmet had visited Jagger in the house he then shared with pop singer Marianne Faithfull on Cheyne Walk in London, where they had both been busted for possession of heroin, LSD, and marijuana on May 21, 1969.
Unbeknownst to either man, Faithfull had been upstairs listening as the two talked about her. Because she was heavily addicted to heroin, Ahmet urged Jagger to think seriously about the damage she could do to the band. “I know it’s going to be tough on you,” Ahmet said, “but she could jeopardize everything.” When Jagger asked what he could do about it, Ahmet replied, “There’s only one thing to do. I’ve seen a lot of heartbreak with junkies. Believe me, old friend, it wrecks the lives of everybody around them, as well. It’s a bottomless pit, and she’ll drag you into it unless you let her go.” In light of all the money Atlantic was about to pay the Stones, Ahmet told Jagger he wanted “some guarantee that the whole deal isn’t going to be blown because of Marianne. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Shortly before Ahmet and Mica went to see the Stones perform the last of their three shows at the Palais des Sports in Paris some months later on September 23, 1970, Ahmet received a call from his old friend Eddie Barclay. A former jazz band leader born Edouard Ruault, he had founded Barclay Records, the premier label in France. A world-renowned playboy, Barclay would marry nine different women before his death at the age of eighty-four. As Mica would later say, “We brought Bianca to the show because she was living with Eddie Barclay and he came to Ahmet and said, ‘You know, Bianca would love so much to go to the Stones.’ So Ahmet arranged it and she spent the whole evening practically on the stage in her black cloak looking very beautiful and that was when it started.”
A stunning dark-eyed beauty whose affection for high society mirrored Jagger’s own long-standing fascination with upper-class life, the two soon became a couple. Unlike Faithfull, Bianca had little taste for the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and did not get along well with Pallenberg. A month after the band had settled into tax exile in France, Jagger stunned his fellow band mates by announcing he intended to marry Bianca, who was then four months pregnant with his child.
In light of his standing as a counterculture hero and his reputation as the greatest ladies’ man of his generation, Jagger might as well have announced he had decided to enter the priesthood. Nonetheless, the two were wed on May 12, 1971, first by the mayor of St. Tropez at the town hall and then in church by a Catholic priest from whom Jagger had been taking religious instruction. Attended by a host of rock stars from England and a sizable percentage of the European press, the town hall ceremony became a major mob scene.
Leaving a record business convention in Las Vegas, Ahmet had flown to New York and then chartered a plane to France because, in his words, “I was a witness at the wedding. They have witnesses rather than best men.” The actual best man at the wedding was Keith Richards. Wearing a pair of braided black tights and a long-sleeved white jersey under a green combat jacket, the guitarist arrived so late for the town hall ceremony that the local chief of police refused to allow him inside and both men were soon “standing there with their hands around each other’s throats screaming in their respective languages.” When Richards was finally granted entry, he chose for reasons known only to him to sit on the bride’s side of the aisle.
As Ahmet would later tell Jason Flom, who began his career at Atlantic in 1979, “Keith was the best man and he was walking around with a bag full of coke, scooping it out with his hand and shoving it in his face. The chief of police came up to him and said in French, ‘What is this powder?’ Keith had this dumbfounded look on his face. Reaching into the bag, I grabbed some, started patting it on Keith’s face, and said in French, ‘You don’t understand. They’re not just musicians. They’re also clowns. And this is their makeup.’ ”
Once Jagger and his new wife returned from their honeymoon, the Stones began recording in the basement of Richards’s seaside villa. Richards, who now was again using heroin, would often go upstairs during sessions to put his young son to bed and never be seen again. As work on the new album slowed to a crawl, drug use in the house increased to unheard-of proportions and Jagger began spending more time in Paris, where Bianca gave birth to their daughter, Jade, in September. When the word came down at the end of November that the villa was about to be raided by the local gendarmes, the Stones were forced to leave France so quickly that Richards and Pallenberg left most of their personal possessions behind.
For the next six months as Jagger and Richards worked together in relative harmony in Los Angeles overdubbing and laboriously mixing and remixing what they had now decided would be the band’s first double album, Ahmet made regular visits to the studio because, in bassist Bill Wyman’s words, he “was keen to check on his investment.” As Richards would later say, “We had a lot of tussles with Ahmet over Exile on Main St. We wanted a double album and he said, ‘A double album doesn’t sell as much as a single album.’ We won. But as far as the sound and the material was concerned, his reaction was, ‘That’s what we need. They’ve gotta rock with this.’ ”
That a double album, especially one featuring a cover consisting of images shot by famed photographer Robert Frank as well as an insert of twelve perforated postcards by photographer Norman Seef, would also cost far more for Atlantic to manufacture was yet another factor in Ahmet’s reluctance to issue Exile on Main St. as the Stones finally persuaded him to do. Six weeks before the album Mick Jagger had initially wanted to call Tropical Disease was to be released on May 7, 1972, with an extensive tour of North America by the Stones slated to begin on June 3 in Vancouver, Jagger and Richards were still trying to decide which mix of certain songs they liked best. Hand-carrying the masters with him, Marshall Chess flew to New York to deliver them personally to Ahmet so the record could be pressed at last.
Despite what the Rolling Stones had put him through while recording Exile on Main St., Ahmet remained fiercely loyal to the band. Able to spin any story to his own advantage, he would later say, “I was with them a great deal in the south of France. I went down several times and it was a bit mad but it worked out all right. That madness and extravagance is part of their way. It’s not related to the music and it is. To the average person in the street, their way of life is dramatic and everyone loves them for that. They enjoyed renting a castle in the south of France and having big parties with very good champagnes and Bordeaux wines and a great chef and all kinds of girls. The south of France was a great place for them. And while it lasted, it was great fun.”
Had it not been for Ahmet, the Rolling Stones might never have even been allowed to enter America for what became to that point in time the highest grossing tour in rock ’n’ roll history. While he would later deny he had done anything more than negotiate with the musicians’ union so the band could perform in the United States, Ahmet used his extensive social and political connections to ensure that Mick Jagger would be granted an entry visa to America despite his 1969 drug bust in London.
Ahmet had first met Senator Jacob K. Javits, the very liberal Republican who sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, through his considerably younger wife, Marion, a denizen of the New York art scene who was also a regular in the back room of Max’s Kansas City, then the hippest downtown hangout in Manhattan. Happy to do a favor for a friend, her husband helped to resolve the problems the Stones might have faced if they had gone through ordinary channels.
As Peter Rudge, who planned and managed this tour, recalled, “It was all done correctly but everything is done on technicalities in that world. I think the Stones were let in because Exile on Main St. was about to be released and it was good for their record sales. It got smoothed over through personal connections. Because that’s the way the system works, isn’t it?”
In each of the thirty-one cities in the United States and Canada where the Stones performed on their tour, the band became front-page headline news. Selling out fifty-one shows in support of their new album, which quickly reached the top of both the American and British charts, the band grossed an unheard-of $3 million in ticket sales. In 1969, only Ramparts and Rolling Stone had covered the band’s American tour. Three years later, the Stones’ publicists had no trouble lining up major features in Life, Time, Newsweek, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, and the band found themselves traveling with their own press corps.
In light of all the excitement the Stones were generating on the road without him, it was not long before Ahmet joined the party and began showing up backstage at various shows, most often with two girls whose collective ages just about equaled his own. Flying into New Orleans on the Warner Bros. jet on June 26, Ahmet arrived about six hours before the Stones. Knowing “Mick and Keith and Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts wanted to hear some New Orleans music,” Ahmet rented a studio in a warehouse at 748 Camp Street and hired “a good marching band and some of the blues guys like Professor Longhair to play for them.”
In his words, “It’s one thing to arrive in New Orleans like a tourist and walk around. You’ll luck into some music and might hear some band playing a bar. You might hear Raymond Burke or some of the old guys but what the Stones dig is black blues music and it’s not easy to find that in one evening. If they wanted to hear Longhair, he might be playing in Algiers and it would have taken them two hours to get there.”
Ahmet arranged for Roosevelt Sykes, a sixty-six-year-old Chicago-based boogie-woogie piano player known as “The Honeydripper,” Snooks Eaglin, a blind guitarist, and the fabled Longhair, whom Ahmet and Herb Abramson had first seen on their field trip down south in 1948, to perform with a New Orleans street marching band at what became the first great party Ahmet threw for the Stones on the tour.
In a huge room with bare beams, a dusty floor, and a single fan whirring overhead—the temperature soon hit a hundred degrees—Ahmet was in his element. By midnight, as Longhair began ripping through “Stagger Lee,” people were sniffing cocaine off the back of their hands as they danced and sweated to the music. By the time Jagger and Richards swept into the party, the joint was jumping and the music was going round and round.
When the street band Ahmet hired began strutting across the floor led by a magnificent old black man in a black hat and white gloves with a starred white sash across his chest and a stuffed pigeon dangling off one shoulder, everyone began walking behind them in time to the second line while waving white handkerchiefs in the air. The munificent patron who had made it all happen, Ahmet sat beaming in a corner of the room writing checks he handed to each musician after their set was done. As he did so, one old musician asked him, “Mick Jagger? Which one is he?”
The party in New Orleans was the kind of gift only Ahmet could have given the Stones and no one enjoyed it more than him. Aside from the overwhelming amount of money and the maddening artistic freedom the band had demanded in return for signing with Atlantic, this was the real reason the Stones had decided to record for the label. Three decades after Ahmet had first come to New Orleans, he was still the vital link between the music now topping the charts and all that had come before.
Ahmet also loved being out on the road with the Stones because it allowed him to indulge in his always unbridled sexual appetites. In the tightly closed community that surrounded the band on tour, stories about Ahmet’s nocturnal activities were often exchanged even as he stood in the dressing room talking to Jagger and Richards before a show.
The single most scurrilous tale concerned an elaborate practical joke Mick Jagger played on Ahmet by respectfully requesting he have dinner with a very proper young woman who planned to enter the diplomatic corps and wanted to discuss her career plans with him. Taking great care to underline the point so Ahmet would behave himself, Jagger stressed that the girl was the daughter of a high-born family who only wanted his sage advice. At some point during the evening, Ahmet found himself lying beneath a glass coffee table in a hotel room as the girl, a high-priced hooker whom Jagger had hired for the night, did unspeakable things on the other side of the glass.
As Peter Rudge would later say, “Ahmet brought so much of the glamour and glitz and sex to that tour because I think he saw it as an opportunity. For Ahmet, Mick was a prize and a capture. Ahmet could read Mick perfectly and he knew exactly what buttons to press with him. I can’t believe any record executive ever had a relationship with an artist like Ahmet did with Mick. There were also other moments with Ahmet that were horrendous. He was a tough negotiator. In the 1970s, Mick was really the manager and we were all de facto managers. So Mick would have me working Ahmet on an angle, he’d have Marshall Chess working Ahmet on an angle, he’d have Rupert Lowenstein working Ahmet on an angle, he’d have someone talking to Jerry Greenberg, someone talking to Nesuhi, and someone taking Jerry Wexler out to dinner. That was how Mick was.”
When the Stones finally hit New York during the third week in July, with their final show at Madison Square Garden scheduled for Jagger’s twenty-ninth birthday, Ahmet pulled out all the stops. In his words, “There were three days of concerts in New York and it was a nightmare because of the number of people who wanted to come. Originally, I was just going to give one party but then I made it two. The first was supposed to be a general reception for the Stones and the official people on the tour and the other was a personal thing I wanted to do for the Stones for being on Atlantic for the first time but it grew out of all proportions because the same people wanted to go to both parties.”
On Monday night, June 24, 1972, six hundred people, David Geffen and Andy Warhol among them, crowded into two large banquet rooms at the exclusive Four Seasons restaurant on East 52nd Street. The party quickly became a zoo scene. As the burnt carbolic smell of amyl nitrate poppers filled the air, the Stones themselves seemed bewildered by the insanity.
As a very weary Richards sank into a chair to avoid being run over by those who wanted to get close to him, he noted, “Right now is when you realize you’re a product.” To the sound of a low grumbling roar from the other side of the room, Mick and Bianca Jagger made their grand entrance as a bevy of photographers walked backward in front of them popping flashbulbs in their faces. Moving steadily, Jagger just kept going until he was out a side door and riding back downstairs in an elevator, leaving the party before most people even knew he had arrived.
Two days later, Ahmet and Mica arrived late for the Stones’ last show at Madison Square Garden only to find their seats had already been taken by people who had no business being there. Making no attempt to evict them, Ahmet spread his white handkerchief on the concrete step beside the seats so that Mica, looking very fashionable as always in a black dress accented by an ivory bracelet trimmed with gold, could sit down. When someone handed Ahmet a joint, he passed it on.
Backstage at the Garden that night, chaos reigned. As Dick Cavett nervously interviewed Jagger for his late night network talk show, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote sat side by side taking it all in like a pair of elder vampires. After appearing with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show to discuss a band he repeatedly called “The Beatles,” Capote would say his “intuition told him the Rolling Stones would never tour this country again” and “would not even exist in three years time” because “they were evanescent people who were not at all important.”
Six years earlier, Capote had invited five hundred of his best friends to his masked Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel. The guest list that night included Senator Jacob and Marion Javits, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford, Senator Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, Jacqueline Kennedy, Greta Garbo, Mr. and Mrs. John Steinbeck, Frank Sinatra, Harper Lee, Henry and Clare Booth Luce, Stavros Niarchos, Prince Stanislaus and Lee Radziwill, William Styron, Norman Mailer, Diana Vreeland, Penelope Tree, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Andy Warhol, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his wife, Happy, as well as assorted Astors, Vanderbilts, Hearsts, Rothschilds, and Whitneys.
The event of the season, if not the era, the party brought together luminaries from the disparate worlds in which Capote felt very much at home. It also set the gold standard for all New York City high society gatherings until Ahmet and Mica decided to throw an intimate little bash for their friends and the Rolling Stones on the Starlight Roof of the St. Regis Hotel on 55th Street just east of Fifth Avenue. Although Capote would later say, “Ahmet and Mica Ertegun are simply two people on the make. Their party was an Ertegun affair and had little relationship to the Stones,” he was there as well.
By the time Ahmet and Mica arrived at the St. Regis, the lobby was already jammed by drag queens with white paint on their faces, who “lolled in gilt chairs, desperate for an invitation.” Before being allowed entry to the inner sanctum, those who had actually been invited to the party had to be carefully vetted by secretaries with private security guards by their side. As many as a hundred people still managed to crash the event.
One of them was Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Hungarian-born actress and socialite whom Ahmet’s father had helped bring to America with her husband, a left-wing Turkish journalist, before World War II. Then seventeen years old, Ahmet had turned Gabor on to marijuana for the first time by passing her a joint. As he would later say, “She never got very high.”
In her tie-dyed evening gown, Gabor began working the party as if her life depended on it. Although she had no idea who Bob Dylan was until her escort, A&P heir Huntington Hartford, informed her he was the most famous rock star in the world, Gabor said, “Oh well, then. I luhv him!” At Dylan’s request, she had her photograph taken with him while saying, “Dollink, ven you’re hot, you’re hot.” As Ahmet would later add, “And when you’re not, you’re not.”
Clad in a straw hat, a flannel shirt, and dark shades, Dylan described the party to a New York Times reporter by saying, “It’s encompassing . . . it’s the beginning of cosmic consciousness.” Calling the party “a Felliniesque finale to the Stones tour,” the reporter noted that the guest list read “like a Who’s Who of guest lists.” Working together, Mica and Mick Jagger had come up with a once-in-a-lifetime collection of people who represented both the high and the low life Ahmet had always loved, as well as all the disparate worlds in which he felt very much at home.
Gianni Bulgari, Andrea de Portago, Oscar and Françoise de la Renta, Graziella Lobo, Count Vega del Ren, Ceezee and Winston Guest, Caterine Milinaire, Lady “Slim” Keith, Lord Hesketh of Easton Neston Castle, Diana Vreeland, Bill Blass, Bill and Chessy Rayner, Bobby Short, Kenneth Jay Lane, Kitty Hawks, Freddie and Isabel Eberstadt, and Clyde and Maggie Newhouse were there, as were Woody Allen, Carly Simon, Dick Cavett, George Plimpton, Jerry Wexler, Bill Graham, and Tennessee Williams.
As Mario Medious, who snuck Peter Wolf and the J. Geils Band in through the kitchen by having them pretend to be roadies carrying Muddy Waters’s amps, would later say, “It was an unbelievable society trip because Ahmet was into that. Ahmet had to do that because Ahmet is the man. Ahmet is The Man, you dig? People stepped back when he walked in. When I walked in, I was just another motherfucker.”
At three in the morning as Count Basie and his band played, one of Andy Warhol’s female superstars popped out of Mick Jagger’s five-foot-high birthday cake wearing nothing but a pair of minuscule black pasties on her breasts and a garter on her right leg. A group of old black tap dancers in white pants, boaters, and white four-in-hand ties carrying white canes led by Sandman Sims then performed. They were followed by Muddy Waters, who had written the song from which the Stones had taken their name.
Some of those who had spent six weeks on the road working day and night to ensure the tour would be a success were not amused. “It’s a travesty; well, it’s ironic,” Peter Rudge said. “I wonder how many of them bought tickets. This has been a rock ’n’ roll tour for the kids and a social tour for everybody else.” In Bill Wyman’s words, “Society finally accepted us on that tour. I couldn’t care less. I’m not very interested in society. If they want to make out they like us, it’s okay with me. But I’m not playing music for society.”
As people partied until five in the morning on the Starlight Roof of the St. Regis that night, one era was most definitely ending as another began. Through the force of his personality and the wide-ranging connections he and Mica had made in high society, Ahmet had brought the Rolling Stones into a brand-new universe even they did not yet fully understand. As Peter Rudge recalled, “Ahmet and Mick crossed rock ’n’ roll over into mainstream culture. They had the same agenda. They truly, truly did.”
While the party had none of the authentic soul of the truly joyous celebration Ahmet had put on for the Stones in New Orleans, it did serve to elevate his own standing. No longer just a legend within the record business, Ahmet had now transformed himself into as great a star as any artist who had ever recorded for his label.
Though no one knew it at the time, the Rolling Stones had hit their creative peak while recording Exile on Main St. Their next three albums on Atlantic, Goats Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, and Black and Blue, spawned hit singles and sold more than enough copies to justify the label’s continuing investment in the band. But critics complained the Stones had lost their way and were now following musical trends rather than setting them as they had once done.
Continuing to do just as he pleased in the studio, Mick Jagger gave Ahmet fits by writing a song for Goats Head Soup entitled “Starfucker” that contained sexually suggestive lyrics referring to movie star Steve McQueen. Fearing a lawsuit, the label’s attorneys urged Ahmet to remove the song from the album. Knowing the title would guarantee the song would never be played on the radio in the United States or England and many American outlets would refuse even to distribute an album with visible profanity on the back over, Ahmet used all his powers of persuasion to convince Jagger to change the name of the song to “Star Star.”
When the band’s five-year contract with Atlantic expired in 1976, the Rolling Stones were once again free to sign with another label. Because Ahmet considered Jagger “a very close personal friend . . . I told him the Stones should make a killing on this contract, because, to be realistic by the time of the next contract they’ll be near forty, and one can’t be sure what will happen then. So I advised him.”
When Robert Stigwood began trying to persuade the Stones to sign with RSO Records and Polygram, Ahmet was forced to compete for the band. From his suite at the Plaza-Athenée Hotel in Paris, Stigwood conducted negotiations by phone with Jagger, who was staying at the equally posh Georges V. Writing down Stigwood’s latest offer, Jagger would then relay the terms to Rupert Lowenstein in Beverly Hills so he could use them to leverage more money from Atlantic.
Despite his long-standing relationship with Jagger, Ahmet had to come up with a $7 million advance for the band’s next five albums to keep the Stones on his label. On February 16, 1977, the Rolling Stones signed a new five-year deal with Atlantic to distribute their records in America while selling the rights outside the U.S. to EMI. As Ahmet would later say, “And what happened was that they got so much for the European rights, and so forth, that they could stay with Atlantic in America.”
A year later thanks to Jagger, Ahmet found himself embroiled in a very public controversy that threatened to destroy his reputation as a champion of black music. In June 1978, the Stones released Some Girls. With Ronnie Wood of the Faces having replaced Mick Taylor on lead guitar and Jagger now playing guitar as well, the album fused elements of punk rock and disco and sold more than six million copies in the United States, making it the band’s most successful album in America.
Viewed by many as the aging dinosaurs of rock, the Stones had proved once again they had not yet lost their edge. When Keith Richards was asked why the Stones had chosen to call the album Some Girls, he replied, “Because we couldn’t remember their fucking names.” Although “Miss You,” the first single from the album, became the last Stones’ song to reach number one in America, Ahmet’s problems began as soon as the album was released.
The cover featured cut-out photographs of the Stones in drag along with a variety of female celebrities. Lucille Ball, Farrah Fawcett, Raquel Welch, Marilyn Monroe’s estate, and Liza Minnelli, representing her mother, Judy Garland, all objected to being portrayed in such a manner and threatened legal action. At great expense to both Atlantic and Rolling Stones Records, the cover was withdrawn and the album had to be reissued.
While that brouhaha cost everyone money, it was small potatoes compared to the controversy stirred up by the lyrics of the title track, which included the line, “Black girls just wanna get fucked all night.” As Jagger would later say, “I suppose we ask for it if we record things like that. Christ, I don’t do these things intentionally. I just wrote it . . . That’s real, and if girls can do that, I can certainly write about it, because it’s what I see.”
When Ahmet asked Jagger “to please change the lyrics,” he replied the song was about “a stupid guy talking” and was “supposed to be a satire.” In Ahmet’s words, “I said, ‘I don’t think people are going to understand that when they hear “black girls like to fuck all night.” ’ It came to a point where I couldn’t get him to change the lyrics, so I knew that trouble was going to come. But if I hadn’t put out the record the way it was, the Stones could have left the label. Our contract was set so that he had the right to put whatever he wanted in the records, as long as it wasn’t illegal—and it wasn’t illegal to say that.”
To Ahmet’s amazement, the album received excellent reviews and sold like crazy without anyone objecting to the lyrics. In his words, “I thought, ‘Jesus, we’ve gotten away with this,’ ” while also proving the Stones “had no black following.” Ahmet then got a call from his old friend Hal Jackson, the former deejay who, after cofounding the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation with Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton, had purchased WLIB, the first African American owned radio station in New York City, and then WBLS.
“Ahmet,” Jackson said, “I hate to tell you this, I’ve been deluged with complaints about this record. You’ve got to take it off the market.” After Ahmet explained that his contract with the Rolling Stones made it impossible for him to do so, Jackson told him he had received a letter of complaint signed by fifteen associations of Baptist women who considered Jagger’s lyrics offensve.
The issue ratcheted up to another level when the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who had marched from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. Martin Luther King and then founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), called to say, “Ahmet, you’re in a world of trouble.” Quickly going public with the issue, Jackson described the song as “vulgar and obscene” and “an insult to colored people.” Announcing he would soon be meeting with Mick Jagger and representatives of Atlantic Records about his complaint, Jackson added, “We do not want to act like censors but we feel that Mick Jagger has a social responsibility.”
Within a week of Hal Jackson’s initial call, Atlantic’s offices in Midtown Manhattan were being picketed by what Ahmet would later call “everybody you could possibly think of . . . even the Abyssinian Church.” Marching up and down the street with signs, the protesters urged everyone to boycott the label’s records.
On every level imaginable, Ahmet’s worst nightmare had now come real. Having built his label on music made by black artists for a black audience, he was now being confronted on a daily basis by black protesters demanding no one buy his records because a white band that had begun its career playing black rhythm and blues had insulted black womanhood. In practical terms, as Peter Rudge would later say, “Ahmet was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He could either piss off Mick or piss off the entire ethos on which Atlantic Records had been founded. Ahmet was consistent in that he didn’t want to take on Jesse Jackson or the black coalition because he would have had to answer to too many great Atlantic artists. That was not something Ahmet could live with and so he chose in my opinion to piss off Mick.”
Over the years, Atlantic had demonstrated its own sense of social responsibility by regularly contributing money to Jackson’s organization. In Jerry Wexler’s words, “He used to come up to my office for his taste and I would throw a check at him like a Hungarian cavalry officer throwing a bag of gold at his tailor. Ahmet and I had separate offices and I would call Ahmet on the intercom, and say, ‘Ahmet, he’s coming down. Don’t give. I gave already.’ While every social and political stance of his is good and admirable, he tried to subvert our artists and turn Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding against me so he could set up a picket line and get more money from me.”
According to Ahmet, who had always maintained a far better personal relationship with Jackson than Wexler did, it was Jackson who came up with a plan to solve Atlantic’s problem by advising Ahmet to come to Chicago to meet with the groups who had initiated the boycott. Ahmet brought with him his longtime assistant Noreen Woods, a black woman who was “like my guardian angel” as well as “a great friend” of Jesse Jackson. Before the meeting began, Jackson warned Ahmet that even though he was about to really light into him and curse him “and say horrible things,” Ahmet was to “just go ahead and calmly explain what this is about.”
“Scared to death” as he walked into the meeting to be confronted by “a sea of black faces—there must have been a hundred people there, all filled up with anger,” Ahmet would later say, “I thought I was going to be lynched. I was the only white person in the hall—and it was very scary.” Ahmet then began explaining he had no control over what the Rolling Stones recorded and that Mick Jagger was not a racist but “quite to the contrary: he has a black child.”
Playing his part to perfection, Jackson said, “Oh man, are you kidding me? . . . You go there, take advantage of black people, and on top of that, you take their money selling records . . . then you turn around and insult them like this. This is black womanhood you’re insulting.” In Ahmet’s words, Jackson then “started to insult me irrationally, and to such an extent that the crowd suddenly began to react against him—because I was calmly continuing on, while he was ranting and raving.” As the crowd began turning toward Ahmet, Jackson shifted gears and said, “On the other hand, Ahmet, you’ve done so much for so many black artists . . . you can’t control what this musician has done. I guess Jagger didn’t mean to say that . . . It might not be clear on the record, because you can hardly understand the lyrics.” In Ahmet’s words, “And suddenly, the whole thing had come to an end.”
Once everyone sat down to have lunch, people began coming over to ask Ahmet questions about Wilson Pickett and LaVern Baker, and “we all left as happy and contented as can be. Jesse is a genius, you know, because he had orchestrated this whole thing knowing that I had tried not to put out the record with that lyric. That man saved my life.”
Ahmet still had to pacify Hal Jackson, who said he would be willing to forget the entire incident if Jagger presented the award at Jackson’s 1979 Talented Teens International pageant in Los Angeles. Breaking his own rule of never being “pushy” with Jagger, Ahmet persuaded him to appear at the event and then flew to Los Angeles, where he called Jagger the day before his scheduled appearance to remind him about it.
Ahmet was about to have lunch with the socialite author Brooke Hayward when he received a frantic call from Hal Jackson saying he was at Jagger’s hotel but the singer could not be awakened. Ahmet rushed over to the hotel only to be told Jagger had been up all night partying and had only gone to bed an hour earlier. “I shouted at him,” Ahmet said. “I threw water at him, but nothing would wake him up.”
Furiously, Hal Jackson demanded that Ahmet come up with another celebrity to present the award or there would be “big trouble.” As he and Brooke Hayward had not yet had lunch, Ahmet directed his driver to take them to the Cocoanut Grove, where he persuaded Hayward to deliver an off-the-cuff speech to “a thousand expectant black teenage girls waiting for Mick Jagger.” Ahmet then had Noreen Woods talk about how she had worked her way up through the ranks at Atlantic and everyone went home happy.
Shortly before his death, Jerry Wexler would explain the real nature of the elaborate charade with Jesse Jackson in Chicago by saying, “Ahmet had to pay a million dollars to them. Ahmet told me he had to make a public mea culpa and then Jesse turned it around and defended him. The contribution had already been agreed upon and the deal was down. Jesse first had to kick Ahmet’s ass and then redeem him.”
Fulfilling their contract, the Stones went on to record Emotional Rescue, Tattoo You, and Undercover for Atlantic. By the time their second five-year deal with the label expired in 1983, in the words of Rupert Lowenstein, “I don’t think Atlantic was all that enchanted with the next contract, and I don’t think the Rolling Stones were all that enchanted with Ahmet. Familiarity breeds contempt. The excitement had gone.”
While Ahmet did fly to London to push the bidding higher, the Stones signed with CBS, a label headed by the explosive Walter Yetnikoff, a record executive whose penchant for screaming tirades and foul-mouthed invective made Jerry Wexler seem like a Boy Scout. In what was then the richest deal in the history of rock, the Stones received a $6 million advance for each of their next four albums as well as $4 million for publicity. In order for CBS to recoup its advance, each new album by the Stones would have to sell three million copies.
As Peter Rudge would later say, “It always shocked me Mick went there but Columbia and CBS were more powerful then than they had ever been before or afterwards. They were the big red Formula One machine, the one to get on, and Mick wanted to make money. When we signed with Atlantic, it was Ahmet’s record company. By 1984, it wasn’t anymore. Atlantic had served their purpose. Ahmet had served his purpose. The legacy of the Stones was secure. Then you cash in, don’t you?”
Unlike Yetnikoff, with whom the band would part company once their contract with CBS was done, Jagger and Ahmet remained close long after their business relationship was over. In Rudge’s words, “Mick is one of those people who doesn’t look back when he moves on. He’s not sentimental. The greatest tribute to Ahmet was that he and Mick remained lifelong friends.”