“I was sitting in Ahmet’s office and I said to him, ‘How do you make a lot of money in the music business?’ and he looked at me and said, ‘You wanna know how?’ and he got up from his desk wearing his very elegant handmade shoes, his Turnbull & Asser shirt, and a Hermès tie looking like a banker and he hunched over with his head down and sort of rumbled across the floor. I said, ‘What the fuck is that?’ He said, ‘That’s how you make a lot of money in the music business.’ I said, ‘I don’t get it.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna do it one more time, watch.’ So he did the same thing again and I said to him, ‘I still don’t get it.’ He said, ‘Schmuck, this is it. One more time. Take notes.’ And he did exactly the same thing so I said, ‘I don’t get it.’ He said, ‘If you’re lucky, you bump into a genius and that makes you rich in the music business!’ Which is the truth and he bumped into a lot of geniuses.”
—David Geffen
Most of those who heard this oft-repeated story about Ahmet assumed he had been talking about bumping into musical geniuses like Ray Charles, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, or Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. As Doug Morris, who worked alongside Ahmet for nearly twenty years at Atlantic, would say, “It’s about bumping into people like Phil Spector, Jerry Wexler, and David Geffen who were talented and really had a connection to the culture. It’s more than ears. There’s a certain kind of intuitiveness about these people who really get it. It’s this understanding, this bilingual kind of thing, this talent. And some of it is inexplicable.”
Recognizing just how well David Geffen fit this particular job description, Ahmet brought him into the record business in 1970 by suggesting he form his own label that Atlantic would then distribute. A deal that at first blush seemed too good to believe for all concerned, the arrangement eventually helped put an end to the greatest partnership in the history of the record business.
Unlike Jerry Wexler, who had also begun his career at Atlantic as Ahmet’s eager and willing student, David Geffen was twenty years younger than Ahmet when he went into business with him. While the two men had much in common, their relationship was always fraught with far more emotion than Ahmet and Wexler had ever allowed themselves to express to one another.
Having begun his career as an agent and then a manager, Geffen truly loved his artists. Willing to go to any length to protect them, he soon earned a reputation as a fierce negotiator who would stop at nothing to get the best deal for his clients. As Paul Rothchild, the producer whom Geffen helped edge out of the mix before signing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to Atlantic, would later say, “He plays hardball with a smaller, harder ball than anyone else.”
David Geffen’s road to success as an authentic record business mogul began in 1970 after he had thrown away a demo submitted to him by the singer-songwriter Jackson Browne only to have his secretary find some eight-by-ten photographs of the performer in the trash, thereby prompting her to urge Geffen to listen to his music. Twenty-two years old, Browne had already written “These Days” and “Colors of the Sun” while under contract to Elektra, only to be dropped by the label after folksinger Tom Rush had recorded the songs.
Convinced Browne was going to become a star, Geffen flew with him to New York so the singer could audition for Clive Davis. As Browne was performing, Davis politely explained he had to leave the room to take a call from Goddard Lieberson, the former head of Columbia Records. Incensed, Geffen ordered Browne to pack up his guitar and they walked out of Davis’s office. Geffen then offered Browne’s services to Atlantic.
“I’m telling you, this guy is good,” Geffen told Ahmet. “I’m the guy who brought you Crosby, Stills, and Nash. I’m doing you a favor. You gotta sign him, he’s gonna be a big star. You’ll make a lot of money, Ahmet.” In Geffen’s words, “Ahmet looked at me, rubbed his bald head, and said, ‘You know what, David? I have a lot of money. Why don’t you start a record company and then you can have a lot of money too.’ I thought, ‘Fuck him. I will start a record company.’ ”
After deciding to call his new label Shelter Records, Geffen learned that Denny Cordell, a British record producer who had made big hits with the Moody Blues and Procol Harum, already owned the name. Consulting a thesaurus, Geffen came up with Asylum as the perfect name for a company he intended to be a safe haven for a brand-new generation of singer-songwriters who were not only skilled musicians but also poets creating work that was uniquely their own. In his or her own way, each was also somewhat mad.
In return for a 50 percent stake in the new label, Atlantic agreed to manufacture, distribute, and promote Asylum’s records for three years with all costs to be charged against the joint venture and all profits to be split equally between the two companies. Ahmet then introduced Geffen to Steve Ross, whom Geffen would later call “kind of a father figure.” Ross gave the arrangement his blessing and Asylum was in business.
A year passed before Asylum released any product but by then Geffen and his partner Elliot Roberts had signed twelve artists to the label, among them Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, J. D. Souther, and the Eagles. Because Geffen and Roberts also managed those who recorded for them, they effectively put an end to the Hollywood studio paradigm on which Atlantic had been founded.
After Jackson Browne had opened for Joni Mitchell at Carnegie Hall on February 23, 1972, Ahmet hosted a gala midnight supper to celebrate the launch of Asylum Records at the Sky Garden Roof atop the St. Moritz Hotel overlooking Central Park. Grateful for all Ahmet had done for him, Geffen told him, “We’re going to be partners in everything forever.”
Certain the Eagles would become even bigger than CSN&Y, Geffen spent $125,000 to record the band’s debut album at Olympic Studios in London. Ahmet did not share his enthusiasm for the group until he heard their version of Jackson Browne’s “Take It Easy.” Instructing the Atlantic promotion department to work the record as hard as possible, Ahmet told Record World magazine on May 6 that the song would “be number one in six weeks.” By midsummer, the single had risen to number twelve on the charts.
Thanks to Ahmet, Geffen had now become someone Joni Mitchell would describe in her 1974 song “Free Man in Paris” as the man who was “stoking the star making machinery behind the popular song.” In Geffen’s words, “Ahmet was involved in the most important transforming moment of my early career and from that point on, he and I became inseparable friends. We went everywhere together. He took me on my first trip to Paris. He introduced me to collecting art. Ahmet was the first person to tell me you had to have Louis Vuitton luggage and Turnbull & Asser shirts and Hermès ties. He was a great storyteller and one of the most entertaining people you could ever meet. The one word you’d inevitably have to come up with for Ahmet was fun. Ahmet was a lot of fun.”
Which was not to say the two men were not also often at odds with one another. As Geffen later said, “Ahmet was unbelievably complicated and he had a lot of demons. We were once having a big fight about something and I said to him, ‘You know, the problem with you, Ahmet, is that everybody loves you. But do you love anybody?’ ” It was a question Jerry Wexler would never have asked.
When Steve Ross approached Geffen about selling Asylum in 1972, Geffen asked for $7 million. Ross agreed to pay it if Geffen quit the management business and signed a long-term employment contract with Warner Communications, the parent company that owned Atlantic. In return for selling his half-interest in the label, Geffen received $400,000 in cash, $1.6 million in promissory notes convertible into WCI common stock, 121,952 shares of Warner common stock then worth $4.7 million, and a yearly salary of $150,000 to run Asylum as a subsidiary of Atlantic.
While Asylum continued issuing one Top Ten album after another that generated huge profits, Warner’s ill-advised purchase of the computer game company Atari cost a billion dollars. Six months after Geffen had sold his label, the value of his common stock plummeted to $800,000. Understandably unhappy with this turn of events, Geffen went to Ross to renegotiate the deal. Eager to keep Geffen happy, Ross came up with a plan to merge Asylum with another label Ahmet had helped him acquire.
In 1969, Ahmet had introduced his fellow St. John’s College alumnus Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records, to Ross and Ted Ashley, who asked Holzman if he would be interested in selling his label to them. Holzman was agreeable to an acquisition deal, but he feared the merger might cause antitrust problems. The deal went nowhere until Ahmet met with Holzman in June 1970 to negotiate a price for Elektra. When Holzman said he wanted $10 million, Ahmet offered $8 million. After an hour and a half of “very congenial” negotiations in which the price kept rising in half-million-dollar increments, Ahmet bumped the offer to $9.5 million only to have Holzman insist he would not sell for less than $10 million.
As Holzman would later say, “In many ways, Ahmet was a rug merchant. He loved to hondle. It was not Ahmet’s money. It was the game. And when you know it’s the game, you just keep saying no. If you ever watched Ahmet play backgammon on the Warner jet with Steve Ross, these were two guys who went at it. It wasn’t for blood but they had a lot invested. Ahmet would go off and sleep for fifteen minutes and wake up totally refreshed and continue the game. I don’t know if they played for money but they both had to win and Ross was better at numbers than Ahmet.”
A day after Ahmet and Holzman had sat down together, the deal was done for $10 million, with Holzman agreeing to stay on as the head of Elektra for three years. In Ahmet’s words, “We bought Elektra and then Jac Holzman wanted to quit so they put him in charge of quadraphonic sound or something that didn’t happen. There was nobody to run Elektra so I told Steve Ross, ‘Let David Geffen run it. He can run Elektra.’ So he took Asylum Records, the label I started with him, to Elektra to try to build it up like a third big label which it never quite became. It was like a poor third of the three Warner labels. He did pretty well with Elektra but he didn’t stay there very long.”
To persuade Geffen to revitalize Elektra, Ross offered him a yearly salary of a million dollars while also promising to pay him the difference in cash each year between the current Warner stock price and what it had been worth when Geffen had sold Asylum. In August 1973, Geffen became the chairman of Elektra-Asylum. Promptly remaking the new label, he dropped twenty-five of Elektra’s thirty-five acts and fired the art director along with the entire promotion, publicity, and production staffs.
Stealing a beat on the competition, Geffen then made front-page news in the trades by convincing Bob Dylan, who had spent his entire career on Columbia, to form his own label, Ashes and Sand, that would be distributed by Elektra-Asylum. After recording Planet Waves in three days in Los Angeles, Dylan set off on a six-week, twenty-one-city nationwide tour, on which he played forty sold-out shows.
Unfortunately, one of those who had also been bidding for Dylan’s services was Jerry Wexler. In 1971, Wexler, then fifty-four years old, had also fallen in love with Geffen’s twenty-four-year-old assistant. The two were married in 1973 but Wexler knew Geffen had tried to persuade her to stop dating a man old enough to be her father. With all this as backstory, the stage was now set for the heated confrontation that would spell the beginning of the end of Jerry Wexler’s brilliant career at Atlantic.
A Yale graduate with a penchant for one-liners who regularly served as toastmaster general at various music industry fundraising affairs, Joe Smith had begun his career in the record business as a disc jockey in Boston during the mid-1950s. After Atlantic’s local distributor had laid some cash on Smith so he would play the label’s new releases, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and Wexler would always make a point of having dinner with the man they “regarded as the intellectual deejay” whenever they visited the city. They soon all became good friends.
A one-of-a-kind record executive who could crunch numbers with corporate accountants while also dealing with the Grateful Dead, Smith had risen steadily through the ranks to become the president of Warner Brothers Records. Because Smith was also known throughout the industry as a genial host, Steve Ross decided to bring his top music division executives together in Smith’s well-appointed home on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills so they could all discuss how best to move forward as a team.
The day itself began innocently enough with a photo shoot of the reigning monarchs of the record business out by Smith’s pool. As Smith would later say, “They lined all of us up on the diving board for the picture. Jerry Wexler, the two Erteguns, Mo Ostin, myself, and David Geffen. Steve Ross was sitting on the lawn and I said, ‘Steve, if this diving board goes, there’s your music division.’ He jumped up and said, ‘Get ’em down. You can take this picture on the ground. You don’t have to send them up there.’ ”
As they were all being photographed, Geffen said something to Wexler about having just signed Bob Dylan. “OK, David,” Wexler replied. “You’ve got Dylan. Now just let’s forget the whole thing.” Everyone then repaired to the large screening room off the garage, where Ross began the meeting by reminding his executives that while labels within the company were allowed to compete with each other for an artist, they could not do so by offering more money. Wexler, whose long-standing dislike for Geffen had just been reignited, said, “Well, if we’re going to follow some kind of rules, let’s talk about who’s fucking up the rules here.” Referring to Bob Dylan, Wexler pointed at Geffen and said, “You stole an artist that we had!” Doing his best to look unconcerned, Geffen replied, “You’re an old washed-up music man, what the fuck do you know?”
Completely losing control of himself as he had done so many times before, most often in the privacy of his office or in a recording studio where the only witnesses were musicians who worked for him, Wexler rose from his chair. Red-faced, the veins bulging in his neck, he lunged at Geffen while screaming, “You agent! You’d jump in a pool of pus to come up with a nickel between your teeth!”
Leaping from his seat, Joe Smith grabbed Wexler before he could throw a punch at Geffen. In a matter of moments, Wexler’s “enormous temper” had transformed a conclave of the most powerful men in the record business into a potential Pier Six brawl. “We can’t have this!” Steve Ross yelled. “We can’t have this!” Getting to his feet, Mo Ostin said, “I’m outta here. I won’t sit through this.” As Geffen would later say, “I couldn’t believe it. No one could. Jerry’s face turned red. The veins on his neck looked like they were going to pop. I thought he was either going to have a heart attack or put a knife through my heart. He yelled at the top of his lungs with such violence and vitriol everyone stopped what they were doing and just held their breath.”
As Smith recalled, “I had to jump on Jerry’s back. Geffen was sitting on a couch with this little grin after he had just zinged Jerry about why Dylan would want to sign with an old man like him and Wexler had yelled that he was an agent who would dive in a pool of pus. The next subject was supposed to be distribution and manufacturing and as Jac Holzman, who could put a nation to sleep, was getting down to details, I said, ‘We’re not going to get anywhere with this. Let’s have lunch.’ ”
Everyone then adjourned to the dining room, where they took their seats at the table by the name cards Smith’s wife had made for them. Unaware of what had just happened in the screening room, she thought the distinctly uneasy atmosphere that prevailed during the meal was caused by her guests’ dislike of her cheese soufflés. As Smith would later say, “What happened at my house became a legendary story. It was also absolutely the beginning of the end for Jerry in terms of how Steve Ross looked at him as well as that Ahmet sided with Geffen. We’d never had turmoil in the executive ranks of the record companies but Geffen was a master planner and his middle name was turmoil. He was the best at it.”
In Geffen’s words, “Jerry was furious I had gotten Dylan because he was very competitive with me and Ahmet loved me and Ahmet had at that point started to lose faith in Jerry. And all of that combined into an outburst that was really unpleasant, to say the least. I wasn’t goading him. Jerry Wexler had an opinion about agents in general. I thought it was incredibly embarrassing behavior and purely jealousy but I never held it against him and I forgave him.” As David Horowitz, whom Steve Ross had just hired to oversee his record companies, would later say, “I was there when it happened and it was certainly ill considered. This was a diatribe against agents and Ted Ashley was more than just a very well known former agent, he was one of the senior management team.”
Six months later, after Bob Dylan had returned to his record business roots by signing a long-term deal with Columbia, Geffen approached Ahmet with a plan to merge Elektra/Asylum and Atlantic. In Ahmet’s words, “David said, ‘Let’s put Atlantic and Elektra/Asylum together and you and I will become cochairmen.’ And he was right. It was a good idea because we could save $25 million a year by not having five different lawyers, different accountants, different this, different that. Instead, we’d have it all in one.”
With Ahmet and Geffen as cochairmen and Wexler as vice chairman, the merger of Atlantic/Elektra/Asylum was formally announced in a press release on June 28, 1974, that stated, “We have contemplated merging our two divisions for some time now in order to achieve more efficient operations for both companies. We believe that the combined Atlantic, Elektra and Asylum labels now have the best line-up of talent of any firm in our industry.”
Basing his account on an interview with Ahmet, Geffen biographer Tom King wrote that Ahmet had “been frightened to share” this information with “Jerry Wexler and his other lieutenants” before the press release appeared and so “mutiny was declared at Atlantic Records on the day plans of the merger made the papers.” Both Jerry Greenberg and Sheldon Vogel threatened to quit if the merger went through. Tracking down Ahmet while he was on a business trip in Europe, Wexler told him point-blank he would never report to Geffen. Shifting into full Old Testament mode during their conversation, he also said, “One day, you’ll cry tears of blood from this wonder boy of yours.” Supposedly it was then Ahmet decided he could not go ahead with his decision.
According to King, when Ahmet told Geffen the merger was not going to happen, Geffen angrily demanded, “How can you do this to me?” Ahmet replied, “Now come on, David. I’m sorry it is not going to work, but you need to understand. I’m trying to hold this company together, and I have to protect Jerry and everybody else.” Geffen then said, “This is between us! You know this is the best thing for the company.”
In truth, the merger fell apart because much like Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Ahmet was not about to relinquish his power to anyone. For Ahmet, the real key to the deal was that if he merged Atlantic with Elektra/Asylum, the resulting label would have, in Jerry Greenberg’s words, done “much more business than Warners Brothers Records and be much bigger than them. That was why Ahmet had agreed to it.” To iron out the details, Ahmet had sent Greenberg to meet with Mel Posner, the president of Elektra/Asylum. Posner began running through a list of changes that would take place at the new label.
In Greenberg’s words, “Mel goes, ‘Okay, we’re keeping our sales guy. Your sales guy is going. We’re doing this. That’s going to change.’ These were David Geffen’s marching orders. Then he says, ‘You know the Rolls-Royce?’ Ahmet had a Rolls-Royce in California that sat there with a driver so he could use it when he came to Los Angeles. So Mel says, ‘The Rolls-Royce has got to go. David says we don’t need it.’ I said, ‘Ahmet’s Rolls-Royce has gotta go? We don’t need it?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ ”
Having carefully written everything down, Greenberg told Posner he would relay what they had discussed to Ahmet. As Greenberg put it, “I don’t walk back. I run back and bust into Ahmet’s office and I say, ‘Ahmet, David’s already got a whole list of who’s staying and who’s going but I want to start with the most important thing just to show you where all this is going. They want to get rid of your Rolls-Royce. David doesn’t think you need it out there full-time anymore and I just wanted you to know. But it’s your call.’ ”
Telling Greenberg to hang on, Ahmet picked up the phone and called Steve Ross. With the deal having already been announced in the trades, Ahmet told Ross, “Steve, I’ve been giving this merger a lot of thought. Asylum has a certain image and a certain way of attracting artists and we have our own image. If you put the two together, it’s not going to work. We’ll be much more successful keeping them separate.” In Greenberg’s words, “The next thing I know, the merger’s undone.”
As Ahmet explained, “So then I kind of postponed it, and David got very upset, and the whole thing fell apart. I think David was quite hurt. But I think everyone thought he would come on too strong, and be too disruptive.” Even in a tempestuous business where long-term relationships between the rulers of record labels could fall apart during a single phone call only to then be put back together before the end of the day, Ahmet’s decision to reverse a merger that had been front-page news in all the trades was extraordinary.
While no one ever loved the perks that came along with running Atlantic more than Ahmet, he did not cancel the deal simply because David Geffen wanted to take away his Rolls-Royce in Los Angeles. In what must have come as a truly great shock, Ahmet suddenly realized that in Geffen he had found a student who in time would outdo his master. To protect himself and his position, Ahmet had to ensure Geffen was not given the opportunity to do so at Atlantic.
Understandably upset by this bizarre turn of events, Geffen would later say, “Ahmet never cared about upsetting Jerry Wexler. Jerry was never a consideration. Ahmet is a big boy, and Ahmet does what he wants, and Ahmet is not that considerate of his employees. They don’t have that big a vote. Ahmet’s a little bit like the gorilla—he sits where he wants . . . Ahmet and I agreed on a merger but he got very upset because friends of his were calling him up to find out if it was a demotion for him.” Geffen would also note, “By the way, it wasn’t a rupture in our relationship.”
While Ahmet’s decision to kill the merger was the first in what would become a long series of rifts, slights, snubs, perceived offenses, and misunderstandings between the two men, Ahmet and Geffen continued to consider one another friends. But even when they saw one another socially, Ahmet could not keep from doing everything he could to keep Geffen in what he still perceived as his proper place.
At some point after the merger had failed, Ahmet found himself in Los Angeles without any plans for the evening. As this in itself was a unique event, Ahmet suggested to Tom Dowd, who was also in L.A., that he meet him and Bianca Jagger for dinner in a restaurant at nine that evening. Arriving with her and “another lady—some countess” at ten-thirty, Ahmet began ordering champagne before sitting down to a meal that did not end until one in the morning.
By then, Mick Jagger had joined the group, prompting Ahmet to say, “There’s got to be a party somewhere.” Instructing a waiter to bring a phone to his table, Ahmet called singer Bette Midler to ask what she was doing. He then told her there was a party at Cher’s house and he would pick her up on his way there. Despite the fact it was now nearly two A.M., Ahmet then phoned Cher to tell her he was coming over with Dowd, Mick and Bianca, the countess, and Midler “for a nightcap.”
Having long since parted company with Sonny, Cher was then living with David Geffen. When Ahmet and his group arrived at their home that night, Cher looked “beautiful in this gold lamé dress.” Everyone then went into the living room, where Jagger sat down at the piano as Cher began singing. Clad in a pair of tennis shoes and shorts, Geffen took it all in. “Look at that creep,” Ahmet confided to Dowd. “How can he dress like that?” Addressing Geffen, Ahmet said, “David, what a lovely outfit!” Ahmet then asked Cher if everyone could have some champagne. “Of course,” she told him, “we always have some chilled.” When Geffen asked her where the champagne was, Ahmet looked at him and said, “We never had that problem when Sonny was here.”
“That was Ahmet,” Dowd said, “pulling people’s strings. Ahmet has a great deal of respect for Geffen but he doesn’t like him as a human being. He has no allegiance to him—because David has no allegiance to anything except for dollar signs. And Ahmet will not renege on a human being, like David would.” Loyal to a fault, Dowd would spend his entire career at Atlantic without ever being paid royalties for the many hit albums he produced for the label before dying at the age of seventy-seven in 2002.
After Geffen’s relationship with Cher ended, he began losing interest in the music business and fulfilled his childhood dream of running a movie studio by becoming the vice chairman of Warner Brothers in 1975. Two years later, he was mistakenly diagnosed with transitional cell carcinoma and retired from show business to teach a course on the music industry and artist management at Yale.
Eventually given a clean bill of health, Geffen decided to return to the record business in 1980 and asked Steve Ross for $25 million to start a new label called Geffen Records in return for a 50 percent stake in the company. A decade later, Geffen would sell his label to MCA for $550 million in stock, thereby making him, as The New York Times reported, “one of the nation’s richest individuals.”
In Geffen’s words, “When I came back into the record business in 1980, Ahmet wanted me to come to Atlantic Records and I said, ‘Not a chance. I’m going to sign with Mo Ostin.’ And he said, ‘Why with Mo?’ I said, ‘Because for all these years I was retired, he never stopped calling me and telling me how much he wanted me.’ And Ahmet said to me, ‘You’ll never have a laugh.’ The truth of the matter was that Ahmet was an awful lot of fun. But you had to pay big time to be in his company.”
When the two men saw one another for the first time after Geffen had decided to go into business with Ostin and Ahmet asked why Geffen had not returned to Atlantic, Geffen responded, “Are you kidding? You’re out of it. Without Jerry Greenberg, Atlantic is nothing! Atlantic is finished!”
In time, Geffen’s own business acumen would far outstrip that of his mentor, resulting in a personal fortune of more than a billion dollars. Staying with what he knew best, Ahmet would spend seven decades as the chairman of Atlantic Records. It was a position he feared he would never have held on to for that long had he made David Geffen his partner.
Like a long-distance marriage that existed in name only, so long as Ahmet and Jerry Wexler were operating from different geographic locations, they could maintain the appearance that they were still partners. Although Wexler had continued to function as a skilled producer and a capable record executive, he and Ahmet had long since parted ways.
When Wexler began coming into work on a daily basis to Atlantic’s plush new offices at the Warner Communications headquarters at 75 Rockefeller Plaza, he soon realized he had been excluded from the day-to-day operations of the label. With both the promotion and marketing departments now reporting to Jerry Greenberg, who had also signed many of Atlantic’s new acts, Wexler, in Greenberg’s words, “couldn’t slip back into what he used to do.” Unable to tolerate the situation, Wexler soon confronted Ahmet by pointing out he had specifically agreed Wexler would be included in all decisions made at the label. Telling his longtime partner he worked far too spontaneously to ever be part of such an arrangement, Ahmet also informed Wexler that those who now worked at Atlantic no longer felt the need to report to him.
As always, Wexler’s personality was at the heart of the matter. Within the new corporate structure at Atlantic, Ahmet told Wexler he was “viewed as abrasive, derisive, and cynical, a maverick at meetings, a flaunter of my quick sales of option stock, an undiplomatic critic.” When Wexler had first begun working at Atlantic, nearly every independent record label had been run by men who shared these same traits.
In the very corporate world the record business had now become, where everyone was expected to be a team player while understanding precisely which rung he or she occupied on the executive ladder, Wexler simply no longer fit. Unlike Ahmet, a natural-born diplomat who could handle any situation with consummate ease and so was flourishing at Warner Communications, Wexler could not tailor his personality to suit his new environment. Ahmet also felt that Wexler had no real interest in the company itself but only really cared about his own artists.
Wexler then demanded to know if Ahmet had now become his boss. Ahmet replied by saying that because of the position he occupied in the corporate structure, the final decision in all such matters belonged to him. As Wexler would later write, “For me it was parity or nothing. No parity, no Wexler.”
“The problem,” Joe Smith said, “was that when Jerry came back to New York, he would fight off everything and deride anything that came down from Warner Communications, the parent company. Ahmet knew how to play the game very well. He had tickets to everything and tables at all the right restaurants and the corporate guys would run around with Ahmet while Wexler was being cantankerous.”
Wexler wrote Ahmet a letter on May 3, 1975, in which he stated, “Under no circumstances, Ahmet, can I be your employee. That’s the bottom line.” Ahmet’s response was “Man, you can’t quit! It’s unthinkable.” Once he realized Wexler had made his decision and would not change his mind, Ahmet did all he could to ensure his longtime partner would get what he was due. As David Horowitz recalled, “One of my first assignments was to work out a parting deal with Jerry. We were prepared to be more than reasonable because the man had made a huge contribution to Warner’s, and Ahmet certainly didn’t bear him any ill will. I can’t say for sure but I think Jerry wanted out.”
On July 17, Jerry Wexler formally announced his resignation as vice chairman of Atlantic Records effective August 1. As he would later say, “When I walked out, I didn’t know what I was going to do for a living or how I was going to survive. But I couldn’t abide the situation. Which was me becoming junior to Ahmet.” While the parting itself was amicable, the long friendship between Ahmet and Wexler ended when he left Atlantic.
In the ensuing years, the two men had no contact at all with one another because, in Wexler’s words, “Ahmet sees only two kinds of people—social people and morons. And I ain’t either one.” Cuttingly, Wexler also suggested the words on Ahmet’s tombstone should read, “He Meant It When He Said It.” Wexler recalled, “There was a big draft between us for years. A big draft. But we very much came together again towards the end.”
Two years after Wexler left Atlantic, he was hired by Mo Ostin to head the New York A&R department of Warner Brothers Records. After leaving the label, he produced albums by Dire Straits, Bob Dylan, and Carlos Santana. Nearly a decade passed before Ahmet and Jerry Wexler saw one another again as members of the nominating committee of the newly created Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York.
As Suzan Hochberg, the director of the institution, recalled, “Jerry called me the day before the nominating committee’s first meeting and he was very nervous and apprehensive about coming. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen Ahmet in a long time and there was some friction when we parted. Is he really going to be there?’ When he walked in, Ahmet and Jerry saw one another and they hugged each other and that was it. The hatchet was buried.” Ahmet and Wexler were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
By then, both men realized that the astonishing body of work they had done together during their twenty-two-year partnership at Atlantic would never be equaled. In every way possible, Wexler had given his life to the label. Working at a feverish pace, he had come into the office early, stayed late, and then spent his weekends at home calling distributors on one of the first multi-line push-button phones to let them know that, in his son’s words, if “they didn’t pay for the hit that was out right now by Solomon Burke, they would not get Ben E. King’s next record.”
In the Atlantic office at 234 West 56th Street, where their desks had faced one another, the two men had staged elaborate charades whenever a manager would come in with an act they wanted to sign. Debating how big a royalty they could afford to pay without bankrupting the label, the partners would go back and forth with one another before finally reaching the figure they had both agreed upon beforehand. As the manager and the artist watched, they would then shake each other’s hands on the deal right in front of them.
Functioning more powerfully as a unit than either could ever have done on his own, they had cajoled great artists into recording material they instinctively knew would be commercially successful. On the road, they had kibitzed and caroused together, goofed on everyone they had met like a pair of hip comics, and even shared a single bed. In the studio, they had clapped their hands in time to the beat while singing backup as Joe Turner cut “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”
On the day Jerry Wexler left 75 Rockefeller Plaza for the final time, he took with him something no one would ever replace at Atlantic. Except for Nesuhi, Ahmet had now lost his last real peer in the record business. As never before, Ahmet was now truly on his own at the company he had founded.