“I knew John Hammond, Jerry Wexler, and Sam Phillips and I’m here to tell you Ahmet was the greatest record executive who ever lived. He was more creative, he had wider taste, he kept himself in the game longer, he had the greatest rapport with the artists, and he made a market again and again and kept it. He did R&B, free jazz, hard rock, soul music, psychedelic rock, disco, and all that stuff in the 1980s and 1990s. He also happened to be kinky in a bunch of different ways, one of which was that he wasn’t particularly dedicated to what you and I know as the truth. The other was that he was comfortable playing the rogue in a world where economic justice wasn’t even a consideration.”
—Dave Marsh
With Atlantic making more money than ever and Doug Morris handling the day-to-day operations as president of the label while Sheldon Vogel oversaw financial matters as vice chairman, Ahmet’s “real job” at the company during the 1980s had become, in the words of writer Eric Poole, “to play the role of Ahmet Ertegun: taking calls from top agents and managers, stroking the important acts, showing up at the shows, flying to New Orleans for a party for Robert Plant.” As Ahmet also told Poole, “There’s a lot of work to do around here. Fortunately, I have people to do it for me.”
While many employees at the label no longer saw Ahmet on a regular basis in the office, he still “set the tone for all operations” and remained the man in charge. Having reached an age when most men begin thinking seriously about retirement, he showed no signs of slowing down and could still stay out until four in the morning only to appear at a company meeting five hours later looking fresh and alert and then astound all those present by coming up with the breakthrough idea.
With artists like Foreigner, AC/DC, Twisted Sister, Yes, White Lion, INXS, Genesis, and Debbie Gibson forming the mainstay of the Atlantic roster during this decade, the label bore little resemblance to what it had been back when Ahmet was still going into the studio on a regular basis to record the music he loved. Admitting the company had “slipped badly in jazz and rhythm and blues” but that he was working as hard as he could to rectify the problem, Ahmet had developed a completely different set of ears for the music Atlantic needed to keep releasing to continue earning huge profits. In his words, “I listen to some current things but mostly I play people like Pee Wee Russell and Bud Freeman and always, Jelly Roll Morton’s ‘Shreveport Stomp.’ In my opinion, that’s the hottest record ever made.”
Having risen to a position of overwhelming power in a business that no longer interested or challenged him, Ahmet seized upon an idea for an annual pay-per-view cable television awards show and transformed it into an institution to which he began devoting nearly as much time and energy as he had put into building Atlantic Records. The original concept for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation had come from a producer named Bruce Brandwein, who wanted to use the organization to lend credibility to a yearly awards ceremony at which the greatest names in rock would be honored and then perform, thereby creating a must-see television event for their fans.
Along with music business attorney David Braun and Suzan Hochberg Evans, who had just graduated from Brooklyn Law School after having majored in communications and journalism at Boston University, Brandwein met with Ahmet to pitch him on the concept in the winter of 1983. After the meeting, Ahmet called Evans to say he was interested in the idea and wanted to discuss it again but only with her. As they were talking about the project in his home one night, Ahmet said, “Why should I do this if it will be a profitable organization for someone else but a charity for me? If this is going to be a well-respected organization the artists are going to buy into and I can put my stamp on, it has to be not-for-profit. It can’t be an excuse to do a television show.”
After naming a few people he thought should get involved to start the ball rolling, Ahmet picked up the phone, called Noreen Woods, and said, “Noreen, what’s the name of that kid who runs Sire Records?” He then sent Evans, who was twenty-four years old, to see forty-one-year-old Seymour Stein.
Instructing Evans to send informational packets about the project to Stein, Allen Grubman, and Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner, Ahmet invited them all to lunch at Pearl’s Chinese restaurant. In Grubman’s words, “I was sitting there eating one spare rib after another as Ahmet began talking about a baseball hall of fame and this hall of fame and all these halls of fame. And then after a few years, it grew into something enormous. Out of a simple lunch of Chinese food. It was unbelievable.”
On April 20, 1983, the four men formed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation. Selecting Evans as the foundation’s executive director, Ahmet installed her in an office three doors down from him at Atlantic and began soliciting contributions from other record companies to fund the project. As she would later say, “Atlantic Records made a contribution and I drew my salary out of that account so Ahmet really did bankroll us in the beginning.” In Jann Wenner’s words, “You couldn’t really have an institution driven by the TV show. It had to be the other way around because in order to make it work, it had to be nonprofit. Breaking the deal with the TV producer took a year or a year and a half with depositions and everything but I just said we were not going to do it that way. And then the real struggle was to figure out what it would be and where it would be located.”
Before the board could begin searching for a physical location, it had to incorporate the foundation, formulate the rules for induction, and create a nominating committee. As Evans recalled, “When we had the early meetings with Ahmet and Jann and Seymour and Allen Grubman, Ahmet used to say, ‘What kind of board meeting is this? This is like a Saturday Night Live writers meeting. We have to get serious.’ Allen Grubman used to look around and say, ‘Ahmet, the five of us, this is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Is this going to take off, or are we it?’ ”
Within a year, Bob Krasnow, the head of Elektra, and Jon Landau, the former music writer who managed Bruce Springsteen, had been brought into the mix but in Evans’s words, “We were really concentrating on the rules for induction and election so we could start honoring artists. That was phase one. We always thought we would eventually purchase a brownstone in New York City and have a few pieces of memorabilia or an actual hall of fame with plaques but that was down the line.”
Shortly before the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame held its first induction ceremony in 1986, Cleveland disc jockey Norm Knight contacted the board about his city’s interest in becoming the institution’s permanent home. Knight then came to New York with a delegation of business leaders and Cleveland mayor George Voinovich for what everyone thought would be, in Evans’s words, “A courtesy meeting but they made such an impressive presentation that Noreen Woods passed me a note that said, ‘Pack your bags.’ Then Ahmet said, ‘If Cleveland is doing this, do we have a fiduciary duty to investigate other possible sites?’ ”
Once people learned about the project, the board was “approached and pitched by Philadelphia, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, and this went on for many months.” When Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, made his pitch, in Evans’s words, “He said, ‘You know, I really love Bruce Springheim.’ We all looked at each other and said, ‘All right, we’re not going to Chicago.’ ”
After 600,000 fans had signed a petition favoring Cleveland as the site for the institution and the city had pledged to provide public funds to pay for construction costs, the board decided, as Evans would later say, “if the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was going to be a success, Cleveland was the place to do it because they were serious about it, they were very energetic, they really wanted it, and they really needed it. It was definitely the best deal.”
The news that Cleveland had been selected as the home for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was announced at the institution’s first awards dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in 1986. With twelve hundred people in attendance, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Jimmie Rodgers, Jimmy Yancey, Robert Johnson, John Hammond, Alan Freed, and Sam Phillips were named as the institution’s first honorees.
Right from the start, Ahmet insisted the only person who should design the building that would house the institution was I. M. Pei, the world-famous sixty-six-year-old Chinese-born architect whom Jacqueline Kennedy had selected to create the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Cambridge. The winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, Pei had also designed the John Hancock Tower in Boston, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, and the glass and steel pyramid at the Louvre in Paris.
After Ahmet had called Pei to say, “We want you to do this,” the architect contacted Evans a few days later and said he had told his daughter Ahmet had asked him to design the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She said, “But you’re an old man. What do you know about rock and roll?” Pei told Evans, “Suzan, those are fighting words. I’m going to do it.” Because Pei “really didn’t know anything about rock ’n’ roll,” Ahmet, Wenner, Stein, and Evans took him to concerts in New York and sent him books about rock ’n’ roll. They then escorted the architect on a weekend trip to Graceland.
After arriving in Memphis, Ahmet learned that the Louis Vuitton case specially made to hold his shoes had been lost in transit. So obsessed with everything made by the designer that when a friend facetiously inquired if he owned a Vuitton toothbrush, his immediate reply was to ask if they made them, Ahmet was beside himself. As Jann Wenner would later say, “Ahmet was so panicked that he had Suzan Evans order our chauffeur to wait for fourteen hours at the airport at who knows what cost to recover it.”
After touring Graceland, everyone continued on to New Orleans, where they spent the night visiting Tipitina’s and Cosmo’s Factory. A couple of days later, Pei called Evans and said, “I’ve got it. I get what rock ’n’ roll is. It’s about energy and that’s what my building is going to reflect. Energy.”
While the original budget Cleveland had proposed in 1985 was $26 million, the sum quickly rose to $40 million. Financed through a combination of public funds, a bond issue that was repaid through hotel taxes, and “a lot of private donations,” the final cost of constructing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame reached $100 million. Situated on the shores of Lake Erie, the building Pei designed features a slanting glass wall not unlike the one he had constructed at the Louvre.
Coated in white metal, the seven-level main structure is connected by a walkway to an adjoining circular performance space mounted on a pillar. Employing “the forms of shopping mall architecture,” Pei used “large walkways and escalators” to allow visitors to “travel from exhibition gallery to gallery effortlessly.” By combining “off-centered wraparounds and angled walls,” the architect hoped to provide what he called “a sense of tumultuous youthful energy, rebelling, flailing about.”
On September 2, 1995, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened its doors with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Yoko Ono and Little Richard, followed by a seven-hour outdoor concert broadcast live by HBO from nearby Cleveland Browns stadium. Ahmet and Mica attended the event with their good friends Renaldo and Caroline Herrera and Sid and Mercedes Bass. As Evans would later say, “Ahmet was delighted that weekend because it would never have happened without him. He was so revered and so highly respected that everyone wanted to work with him on it and he was really the force behind this. He was always on the phone with any problems we were having and he put his stamp of approval on everything. Ahmet got the whole music industry actively involved.”
In Jann Wenner’s words, “Ahmet was the guiding moral and aesthetic sensibility and consciousness. All along the way, decisions had to be made on every level. How do you reconcile the formality and elegance of a museum with the rudeness and street stuff of an art form like this? Without getting so precious? Throughout all of this, Ahmet was the lodestone about what would be appropriate and what would be in good taste and what would not. In the end, it was always, ‘What does Ahmet think?’ Because Ahmet had the vision.”
In much the same way Herb Abramson, Jerry Wexler, and Jerry Greenberg had taken care of the day-to-day business at Atlantic, Wenner “deputized” himself to Ahmet by saying, “Okay, I’ll be the guy who gets it all organized. I’ll be the hit man.” As he would add, “In the record business, marketing was always about how to get your records played on the air for free. Therefore, what the record business guys knew about marketing was cash and cocaine. Because of their huge success over the years, they all thought they were experts at this. They were just experts at payola. These people were now on the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame trying to build a hundred-million-dollar building and they just did not have a clue.”
Nonetheless, in the house Ahmet had built, Wenner decided to surprise the man who had made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a reality by naming the main exhibition hall after him. While Ahmet seemed “nonplussed” by the honor, no one took more pleasure when it came to inducting new honorees. Tinged with humor and his own brand of erudite music scholarship, the speeches Ahmet carefully wrote by hand on lined yellow notepaper and then delivered in his characteristic hipster drawl reflected his deep, abiding love for a particularly American art form he believed “had changed history and popular culture” and so deserved to be preserved for future generations.
The annual induction ceremony also soon became noteworthy for the incredible collection of rock superstars who would perform at the end of the dinner. In Wenner’s words, “Some years, you had these fantastic jam sessions with Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, and Bruce Springsteen all playing together onstage. When those jams took place, it was the best show of the year and I felt it had to be shared with a larger audience.”
Although Ahmet initially “mightily resisted” televising the event, Wenner insisted “it was wrong to be that elitist about it. The nature and character of the dinner wouldn’t change so long as we didn’t make it into a live show. We could tape it.” In typical fashion, Ahmet finally conceded by saying “I don’t think the issue is whether or not we’re whores. I think what we’re discussing is how much we charge.” In 2008, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s nonperformer award was renamed the Ahmet Ertegun Award.
While some questioned the basic notion of enshrining an anti-establishment art form like rock ’n’ roll in such a formal setting and there were continuing controversies concerning the nominating and selection process, those who had labored to bring about the creation of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame did not let it affect the way they did business with one another. Even as he and Ahmet were collaborating to form the institution in 1984, Bob Krasnow of Elektra was doing all he could to sign a band whose last album had sold only twenty thousand copies. As he would later say, “Ahmet wanted Metallica in the worst way and we weren’t supposed to outbid each other inside the Warner Music Group. They were at half a million for the advance and I said, ‘Fuck it,’ and I went to a million. Doug Morris went crazy and went to Ahmet and he called me one night just as I got home.”
As Krasnow recalled, “I get on the phone and Ahmet says, ‘I was in this limo the other night and they told me you were in this limo with those guys from Metallica and you told them we were a piece of shit and I’m going to fuck you up and you’re going to pay for this.’ It was just outrageous but I couldn’t answer because he wouldn’t let me. Not yelling but forceful and swearing like crazy and Ahmet didn’t swear that much. But he was pissed.”
Thinking Ahmet was going to get him fired for what he had done, Krasnow hung up. The next day, he called Steve Ross to let him know he intended to do whatever he could to sign the band. “And Ross said, ‘I’m not getting involved.’ That was his brilliance. We sold only 200,000 copies of the first album and Ahmet was kind of happy that nothing really happened and the next album sold twenty million worldwide. I hated competing with Ahmet. But when I did beat him, I loved it.”
Nearly forty years after Ruth Brown had become his label’s first big star, Ahmet found himself doing battle with her in what soon became a very public controversy. The issue was money owed to the singer as well as many of the other pioneering black rhythm and blues artists who had helped give Atlantic its start. While some viewed the bitter five-year legal struggle that followed as simply a case of chickens coming home to roost, the real reason Ahmet became the poster boy for the issue was his enduring success.
By the mid-1980s, Ahmet was the last formerly independent record label owner still in the business. As Howell Begle, the lawyer who represented Brown and many other black artists in their campaign to be paid what they were owed, would later say, “Ahmet was still around. Of all the people from that era, he was the only guy left so he couldn’t say he didn’t remember or didn’t know because there was no place for him to hide. He was still there and he still had the same people like Fran Wakschal working for him.”
Over the years, Ahmet had always made a point of stressing that, unlike its competitors, Atlantic had paid its artists the royalties they were due. As Begle would learn during his long pro bono stint as Brown’s attorney, this was true only up to a certain point in time. “A big fan of early rock ’n’ roll and R&B” who had first seen Ruth Brown perform on Alan Freed’s television show, Howell Begle had graduated from Sewanee University and then attended the University of Michigan Law School. After being drafted into the army during the Vietnam War, he served for three years as a captain charged with military prosecutions on Okinawa. Returning to civilian life, Begle spent the next decade in Washington representing high-profile clients like Senators George Mitchell of Maine and Bob Dole of Kansas, Governor Ann Richards of Texas, and CBS newscaster Roger Mudd.
Asked by a friend to meet Brown as she was performing at Ford’s Theatre in Washington in 1982, Begle brought along several of the singer’s albums, which he asked her to autograph. When Brown asked where he had gotten them, Begle said he had paid dearly for the albums only to be told by the singer that she herself had not received any royalties from Atlantic since leaving the label in 1961.
In dire need of money to pay her bills two years later, Brown had written a ten-page letter to Ahmet in which she had “laid herself naked.” Although he then sent her a check for a thousand dollars, the singer remained convinced she was “entitled to more than crumbs from the rich man’s label.” At some point, Brown had also gone to see Ahmet at Atlantic to ask for another loan only to be told to take a seat and wait. Four hours later, she was still sitting there.
After being forced to work as a bus driver and a nurse’s aide to support herself, Brown had resuscitated her show business career in the 1970s when Norman Lear cast her in several episodes of his hit television series The Jeffersons. When Brown began seeing European reissues of albums she had recorded for Atlantic, the singer contacted three different attorneys only to have each of them drop her case after being informed by Atlantic that she was in debt to the label for a very considerable sum and should not pursue the issue lest they come after her for the money. Brown was also told the statute of limitations on collecting royalties had run out.
The actual two-page contract Brown signed with Atlantic in 1952 had guaranteed her a $200 payment for each side she recorded for the label. By 1958, her fee had risen to $325 a side. Brown was also to receive a 5 percent royalty rate but only after Atlantic’s production costs had been recouped. In accordance with what was then standard industry practice, Brown was charged for all musicians’ fees and arrangements. She received no royalties on promotional copies of her records and Atlantic withheld a 10 percent allowance for breakage. If only one out of three sides she had cut was released, recording expenses for all her sessions were attached to it.
In a business where disputes over money were always personal, Ruth Brown was ideally suited by both temperament and personality to take on a record industry colossus like Ahmet Ertegun. Begle said, “I truly believed in Ruth because this woman was tough as nails. I knew I could trust her and I believe Atlantic knew she was not going to be bought off. And she had a loud mouth. Ruth would just bash these people from the stage and tell her story of how this whole generation of artists was being beaten down.”
After Begle had procured copies of Brown’s original contracts with Atlantic from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in 1984, he learned the label was legally obligated to provide her with regular statements showing whether or not she had earned any royalties. In Begle’s words, “So I said, ‘I bet these guys don’t know what she’s earned,’ and if I can get them to start issuing statements to her and other people, they’re going to possibly commit mail fraud,” an offense for which Begle knew Atlantic could be prosecuted under the RICO act. Begle then began pestering the label for Brown’s royalty statements. In his words, “I was in there screaming at them all the time, ‘Don’t you have royalty statements? Don’t you have copies of anything?’ But who in their right mind would have copies of royalty statements twenty-five to thirty years later? Out of frustration one day, Fran Wakschal said, ‘Okay. It’s in that box over there.’ ”
In the box, Begle found Brown’s royalty statements from May 15, 1955, through 1964. The statements revealed that at the end of her career at Atlantic, Brown owed the label $25,830.83. The box also contained three memos that comprised what Begle called “the smoking gun.” Dated June 8, 1983, one memo read, “We did not pick up royalties earned foreign from 4/1/60 to 9/30/71.”
In Begle’s words, “What they were basically admitting in the memo was that when all these artists finished their careers in the 1960s and they all had these large debit balances, the company decided there was no way in hell these people were ever going to work their way out so let’s don’t even bother to go through the exercise of even posting what they earned. All of Atlantic’s royalty statements were fraudulent because they knew they were missing eleven years’ worth of data in those that had debit balances. Every statement they had sent out after that was just another nail in their coffin under RICO.”
Deciding it would be futile to sue Atlantic because “these people were going to drain all our financial resources in discovery” and because he knew most of his other clients would have been willing to accept any settlement offer the label made them, Begle decided to try his case in the court of public opinion.
With Brown, Begle appeared on the CBS newsmagazine show West 57th. While being interviewed by Meredith Vieira, Begle told a national television audience that Big Joe Turner had actually worked his way out of his unrecouped balance until Atlantic decided to release a fourteen-volume retrospective package of its early hits to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the label and then charged him for all the remastering costs.
Then seventy-four years old, Turner was, in Begle’s words, in “awful, terrible shape. He weighed 450 pounds and all he wanted to do was eat crabs. His diabetes was really killing him.” Two months after the television segment aired, Turner, “The Boss of the Blues,” died of a heart attack on November 24, 1985. Doc Pomus, the legendary songwriter who had first worked for Atlantic during the label’s earliest days in the Hotel Jefferson, had by then already called Ahmet to let him know Turner was dying and that Pomus was doing a benefit show for him at the Lone Star Cafe.
As Pomus recalled, “I’d spoken to Ahmet maybe twice in fifteen years and it sure wasn’t because Henry Kissinger had invited us to the same party. But Ahmet and Mica came to the benefit, hanging out all night in this funky joint eating chili. She was like something from another planet but Ahmet paid for Joe’s funeral and the mortgage on Joe’s house, without telling anyone. That was righteous, that was noble, and I knew then that Ahmet, in a certain way, was the same guy I knew forty years ago.” In Begle’s view, “Ahmet loved to be the good guy. He didn’t pay these people anything in the sense of what they were owed but he was happy to have them come to him and say, ‘I’m down on my luck, I need help with making my house payments.’ ”
In July 1986, with the help of Congressman Mickey Leland of Texas, Begle arranged for Ruth Brown to testify at a congressional hearing chaired by Representative John Conyers of Michigan concerning pending legislation to limit the filing of civil suits under the RICO act. Jesse Jackson also attended the hearing and the story about Brown’s appearance before the committee appeared in newspapers all over America. Shortly before the hearing, Begle received a royalty statement from Atlantic covering her earnings from June 1, 1960, to May 31, 1980. The singer’s total royalties came to $354 for domestic earnings and $431 in foreign sales.
Three months later, Leland arranged for Begle to sit down with Jesse Jackson, who was scheduled to meet with Steve Ross the next day. Flying to New York, Begle spent the night explaining to Jackson how artists like Brook Benton, Solomon Burke, Ruth Brown, the Chords, the Clovers, the Coasters, the Drifters, Clyde McPhatter, Sam and Dave, Chuck Willis, Ivory Joe Hunter, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Booker T. and the MG’s, Eddie Floyd, Chris Kenner, Willis Jackson, the Marquees, William Bell, and Doris Troy had been deprived of their royalties.
After Jackson told Ross, his general counsel, and Bob Morgado, whom Ross had brought in to oversee the Warner Music Group, of his concerns about the scarcity of black executives in record industry management positions as well as Warner’s business dealings in South Africa, Begle talked for thirty minutes. Jackson then informed Ross that he and Begle were on their way to a black radio programmers’ convention in Houston. In Begle’s words, “We went down there together and Jesse signed up 150 radio stations who agreed to refuse to report their airplay of Atlantic artists to Billboard.”
In March 1987, Australian journalist Claudia Wright wrote an article in The Washington Post entitled, “Ahmet Ertegun: The Skeletons in the Closet Sing Rock ’n’ Roll” in which she noted that Atlantic had reported earnings of over $200 million in 1985. In light of Ahmet’s position as the chairman of the board of the American Turkish Society and a member of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, along with David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, Wright called him the most important political asset Turkey had in America and said the potential lawsuit over delinquent royalties could only serve to embarrass Turkey and its friends in the United States.
For the next fourteen months, Begle met with Warner executives as well as Leland and Jackson to resolve the issue. Leland pushed for the creation of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation to aid and represent pioneering black artists. After the Warner Music Group offered to contribute $150,000 to establish the foundation, Leland’s representative held out for a $1.5 million donation because, in Begle’s words, “It was all going to charity so it didn’t really matter to them.”
The final agreement stipulated that Ahmet would pick thirty-five artists whose royalty accounts would be reopened. Only actual session costs and advances would be deducted from their royalties and all unrecouped balances would be wiped out back to 1970, the year Atlantic had stopped keeping track of their earnings. The Warner Music Group agreed to donate $1.5 million to create the Rhythm & Blues Foundation and also established a royalty payment fund of $250,000 from which Ruth Brown received $30,000 and groups like the Coasters and the Drifters were given $50,000 payments.
Three days before Atlantic’s gala fortieth anniversary celebration at Madison Square Garden on May 14, 1988, Begle received a check for $1.5 million. As he would later say, “The gala made them settle. The check was written out of the proceeds of the Madison Square Garden concert, which were going to charity anyway. No letter. No press release on the deal. Just a note that said, ‘Don’t cash till Monday.’ No agreement, nothing. Just, ‘Here’s the money, you sonsabitches.’ ” During the show, however, Bob Morgado pledged to come up with another $450,000 over the next three years to cover the new foundation’s operating expenses.
As Dave Marsh recalled, “Ahmet could have worked with any entertainment lawyer and it could have all been settled on the q.t. but Howell was from another solar system so it couldn’t have been, ‘I’ll take care of you when I sign the new kid.’ For Ahmet, it involved admitting the story wasn’t true. It blew his cover. It never had anything to do with dollars because the dollars were not that many and they weren’t coming out of his pocket.”
With comedian Dan Aykroyd, the former Blues Brother who had performed with Sam Moore of Sam and Dave at the gala, Doc Pomus, Bonnie Raitt, Dave Marsh, Mickey Leland, Jesse Jackson, and Howell Begle as members of the board, and Ahmet in attendance, the directors of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation met for the first time in September 1988. Ahmet and Begle, who was then still “pushing to get the royalty rates up” had “a really intense argument.”
“In a real fit of anger,” Begle said, “Ahmet basically told me he was receiving all of Joe Turner’s royalties. Sort of like, ‘You stupid ass guy, you think you’re doing something good. You know who’s getting this money? Me.’ I had been getting copies of Joe’s royalty statements and I could never figure out who was the other person who was being copied on them but then it made complete sense. So if Ahmet paid off the mortgage, he did it in return for asking for Joe’s royalties. Because Ahmet didn’t need that embarrassment, the next thing I saw on Joe’s royalty statement was the Atlantic Foundation so Ahmet had changed it. He corrected the situation and gave the money to charity.”
Expecting the rest of the industry to follow Warner’s lead, Begle and Marsh then went to the heads of other record labels only to learn they had no intention of doing so. Irving Azoff, who was about to leave MCA, did agree to void all the contracts the label had acquired from Chess and Checker, wipe out all unrecouped balances for those artists, and offer them a 10 percent royalty rate. Eventually, both Capitol/EMI and Sony also agreed to raise their payments to that level.
“We were in a Rhythm & Blues Foundation meeting one day,” Marsh recalled, “and I said, ‘I don’t ever want to go through this again. That’s why I’m here.’ And Ahmet said, ‘That was never going to happen. There never was a problem.’ I looked at Doc Pomus as we were walking out of the room and Doc said, ‘It don’t matter because these guys are never going to care about it the way we do. And they’re basically going to get to write the history.’ And I thought, ‘Not on your life.’ ”
In her autobiography, Ruth Brown wrote about a conversation Marsh had with Pomus before his death in 1991 in which the songwriter told him, “The guys at Atlantic were not like the rest of them. They were better.” When Marsh asked if they were better enough, Pomus said no but that “Ahmet was not Morris Levy.” In response to Marsh’s question as to whether the partners at Atlantic had stuck “to what the letter of their artists’ contracts said,” Pomus replied, “No, they did not.”
While many of those who ran independent record labels in the early days of the business regularly put their names on songs they had not written, Ahmet and Jerry Wexler had always maintained they had taken songwriting credit only for work they had actually done. But as Solomon Burke pointed out, “Jerry claimed he and Bert Berns wrote ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,’ which they did not. I wrote the song and Jerry suggested I had to put his and Bert Berns’s name on the song so somebody would play it. We bickered constantly over the fact he wouldn’t give back the writing and publishing and that carried on until his demise. They’re still credited and they’re getting 75 percent because Jerry escalated the ownership once the record took off and groups like the Rolling Stones recorded it.”
Shortly before Ben E. King was asked to leave the Drifters in 1961, the singer had written “Stand by Me” with the group in mind and then rehearsed the song with them. After King finished a solo session with Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber, they asked if he had anything else to record. According to King, “I showed them this song. They gathered around and did a head arrangement real quick and that was how the song came out. But all of a sudden, I adopted two writers. They put their names on it.” Leiber and Stoller tell a completely different version of the story.
King then came up with “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied),” a soundalike hit on which songwriting credit was shared by Ahmet and Betty Nelson. In King’s words, “Ahmet had the ability to write a song and he might have changed a word here and there. I wasn’t upset his name was on it. That meant they were going to push it because they got a part of the pie.” It was precisely because of such practices that Begle and Marsh had worked so hard to create the Rhythm & Blues Foundation.
In 1991, Marsh resigned in protest from the board when Time Warner reneged on its payment of the final third of the $450,000 Morgado had pledged to cover operating expenses until EMI also agreed to offer financial support. Marsh questioned whether this was a result of Time Warner’s “failed stock offering” or, as he wrote in his Rock & Roll Confidential newsletter, “Is it just a reassertion of the record industry’s plantation mentality, in which music makers are treated like sharecroppers, to be paid what the companies want, when they get around to it? Either way, it’s intolerable.”
By then, Ruth Brown had become a member of the board of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation. After having been nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for five consecutive years, the singer was dropped from the list of potential honorees in 1990 and 1991. In her autobiography, Brown wrote she had been told this was Ahmet being “vicious and vindictive. This is his retribution. He’ll never forgive you for getting the better of him.”
As Jon Landau, a member of the nominating committee since its inception, explained, “There is no truth to the story that Ahmet tried to keep Ruth Brown out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because that’s not the way it works. The nominating committee includes more than thirty members and is really independent. Ahmet was certainly on the committee but I never perceived him as having a negative attitude towards Ruth nor pressuring anyone in any way. The fact that someone appears as a nominee one year and not another is a commonplace happening and so I would not attach any great weight to it. In other words, there was no conspiracy.”
When Brown was finally inducted in 1993, Ahmet introduced her. As she accepted her award, Brown said, “I really don’t think there’s much more to say at this point . . . except where’s my gold record, Ahmet?” The singer then thanked him for the gift he had brought her after her automobile accident in 1949. Saying this award was also a gift, she added, “The only thing left for me to do now is record for Atlantic again.”
As Brown wrote in her autobiography, “Many tried their darndest to conjure up where I had this hatred going for Ahmet Ertegun. I told them that was not and never had been the case. Anger and resentment, undoubtedly, and a burning sense of injustice. For every Picasso he had hanging on his wall, I had a damp patch on mine. But hatred? Never.” While Begle described the two as “good-natured ex-combatants,” this was before Brown learned from Dave Marsh that Ahmet and Herb Abramson had been partners with her manager, Dorothy Calloway.
In Jerry Wexler’s view, “It was not as if Ruth Brown did not have a point to make about the royalties but you must remember that her career went into decline and she wound up in the red because there were always these ‘twos and fews’ she would come in for. She kept coming in for a little taste. ‘Can I get twenty-five hundred? Can you give me a thousand?’ The money went on the record. It was a charge against royalties. And she is such a little hypocrite. When she would see Ahmet, it was, ‘Oh, Ahmet, how are you, darling?’ It was just horrible.”
In Begle’s words, “Ruth was difficult. Absolutely. And a diva of major proportions, yes.” In 1987 before the royalty dispute had been resolved, Brown was appearing in “a little off-Broadway show called Staggerlee.” As the singer was sitting in her dressing room after a performance, she was told a man from the record company was there to see her. Brown asked who it was and what record company he was from only to hear her visitor answer, “It’s Ahmet from Atlantic.”
In Brown’s words, “I just looked at him, he looked at me, and I think his eyes got watery, and I got watery. Before I knew it, the tears were running. And he just walked over to me, and I embraced him, and he said in my ear, ‘Let’s don’t talk now, but everything’s going to be all right. I’d never let anything happen to you.’ ” As he turned away, Ahmet said, “You know, Ruth, you got a good lawyer.” Insofar as Ahmet and his first great star were concerned, it was Rashomon right to the bitter end.
Like Topsy, the event Ahmet had originally planned to hold at Radio City Music Hall on May 14, 1988, to celebrate his label’s fortieth anniversary grew and grew until it became an extravaganza that began in Madison Square Garden at one-thirty in the afternoon and did not end until twelve hours later when Led Zeppelin performed live for the first time since the death of drummer John Bonham. Officially entitled “Atlantic Records Fortieth Anniversary: It’s Only Rock & Roll,” the marathon concert was broadcast live overseas on HBO, while in America, ABC aired highlights of the show.
With tickets priced at $50 to $100 and Coca-Cola having provided $3 million for corporate sponsorship rights as well as a guarantee of another $2 million in merchandising, the show raised more than $10 million for charities ranging from Amnesty International to the fledgling Rhythm & Blues Foundation. In the course of a single day, the concert also provided Ahmet with the opportunity to demonstrate the unique position he held in the history of what had now become the most popular form of music in the world.
The show began with the Coasters doing “That Is Rock ’n’ Roll,” followed by Stephen Stills and Graham Nash performing “Southern Cross” to a nearly empty arena without band mate David Crosby, who lay sick in his hotel bed. At one-forty-five in the afternoon, Phil Collins, who had begun his career as the drummer in Genesis, took the stage to perform “In the Air Tonight.”
In 1980, Collins had played Ahmet a final mix of the song only to have him ask where the downbeat was. After Collins pointed it out to him, Ahmet said, “You know that, I know that, but the kids listening on the radio won’t know that.” Returning to London, Collins added drums to his two-track mix and the song became a huge hit that established his solo career. Collins explained, “Ahmet was not only musical, but he also knew the audience’s shortcomings—no point in being hip if they miss it.” The two became such close friends that, in Collins’s words, “On more than the odd occasion, he referred to me as ‘the son he never had.’ ”
Among the show’s many highlights were LaVern Baker giving her first performance in America in two decades, Ben E. King doing a medley of Drifters’ songs, guitarist Steve Cropper leading a tribute to Otis Redding, and Foreigner doing “I Want to Know What Love Is” with Stills, Collins, and Roberta Flack. Sam Moore and Dan Aykroyd appeared as the Blues Brothers, the Rascals played together for the first time in seventeen years, the Bee Gees performed after a nine-year hiatus, and Rufus Thomas, then seventy-one years old, did “Walking the Dog” in shorts and platform boots.
The list of those who did not appear at the show was equally impressive. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had said they would be there but did not appear. Nor did Neil Young or Eric Clapton, “who did not want to be railroaded into a Cream reunion.” Pete Townshend of The Who, whom Doug Morris had signed to Atco as a solo act, was also not there. Nor were INXS, the J. Geils Band, Bette Midler, or Chic. Aretha Franklin did not appear because her fear of flying had kept her in Detroit. The most significant no-show was Ray Charles, who did not perform because he was appearing across town with Peter Martins and the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, a gig Ahmet had persuaded him to play with Fathead Newman, Phil Guilbeau, and Hank Crawford from his original band.
Having been left behind by the rock market, the artist Ahmet had respected above all others had re-signed with Atlantic in 1977. Eager to make hits with Charles for a new audience, Jerry Wexler had offered to take the artist to record in Muscle Shoals only to have him say, “I got my own ideas, cousin,” and then insist he would only deal with Ahmet. The two clashed over the material Charles had chosen to record and after Charles refused to work with any of the producers Ahmet suggested, he was forced to release an album by Charles that went nowhere. By 1980, both men were ready to call it quits and Charles went his own way again, this time for good.
After Ahmet had spent some time backstage at Madison Square Garden reminiscing about the old days with Ruth Brown and Fathead Newman, the tenor sax player told him he had to go join Charles at Lincoln Center. Saying “Tell Ray I said hello,” Ahmet moved off only to have Newman turn to Ruth Brown and say, “I won’t tell Ahmet what Ray really told me to tell him.” “Don’t,” she replied. “It’s been a good evening so far.”
Escorted by their bodyguards, Henry Kissinger and his wife, Nancy, arrived at the show at five P.M. as a rejuvenated Crosby, along with Stills and Nash, were playing “Wooden Ships.” Finding Mica, who was wearing an Atlantic Records warmup jacket and a strand of enormous pearls, the Kissingers made their way past Bill and Chessy Rayner, Sid Bass, Mercedes Kellogg, and Jerry Zipkin to greet Ahmet. As a cloud of marijuana smoke drifted their way from an adjoining section, Ahmet kissed the Kissingers on both cheeks, introduced them to Steve Ross, and then escorted the couple backstage.
In the years since Kissinger had helped bring Pelé to the Cosmos, he and Ahmet had become good friends who often traveled together with their wives. In 1974 while Kissinger was still serving as secretary of state, Ahmet had traveled with him to Turkey. With Turkish troops having occupied Cyprus and peace talks to resolve the future of the island under way in Geneva, Kissinger told Ahmet he did not want to give any interviews during his visit. Nonetheless, there were headlines about him in the Turkish newspapers every day. As Kissinger would later say of their visit, “Ahmet had appointed himself as my press secretary and held interviews about my thoughts, which made me wildly popular in Turkey. Even when he was driving you mad, you couldn’t really be angry at Ahmet.”
After a military coup took place in Turkey in 1980 and there was no contact between the American government and the new regime, Ahmet invited Kissinger to stay at his summer home in Bodrum and then arranged a trip to Ankara, where they met with the new president and the defense and foreign ministers. In Ahmet’s words, “It was important for America and Turkey and it was a pleasure for me.”
Five years later, Ahmet and Mica and the Kissingers visited China. In Kissinger’s words, “I tried to explain to Ahmet that the Chinese take everything that is said in my presence seriously because I have a certain status there. Ahmet might have been willing to accept that if I had not made the mistake of telling a Chinese leader that Turks have no sense of humor. This obliged Ahmet to tell a joke every time we met a Chinese official. Some of them, I’m sure, they had never heard before.”
At a formal dinner one night, Ahmet told a joke about a Chinese rabbi who had gone to services at Temple Emanu-El in New York. Asked about the experience, the rabbi said he had loved the service and the synagogue was beautiful but, “I didn’t see anyone who looked Jewish.” Because the hosts did not get the punch line, Kissinger was forced to explain it to them.
While Kissinger knew nothing about the world of rock ’n’ roll and “had no connection whatsoever with that kind of music,” he was comfortable with fellow celebrities like Michael Douglas, Bill Murray, and Bianca Jagger, all of whom were backstage that night at Madison Square Garden. Introducing Kissinger to someone he had never met, Ahmet said, “Henry, this is my friend Wilson Pickett.”
Known for good reason as “The Wicked Mr. Pickett,” the legendary soul singer had recorded classics like “In the Midnight Hour” and “Mustang Sally” for Jerry Wexler and then gotten them both banned from the Stax studios in Memphis after starting a fistfight with soul singer Percy Sledge. When he was asked to record a cover version of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” Pickett insisted Jerry Wexler would never release a song called “Hey Jew.” Short-tempered and physically explosive, Pickett regularly carried a gun. In May 1988, he was still on probation for having brought a loaded shotgun to a bar fight in New Jersey.
Delighted to be meeting the former secretary of state, Pickett said, “Henry Kissinger, my man!” and then gave him a big hug. Beaming, Kissinger replied, “Mr. Pickett, a pleasure.” It was a moment only Ahmet could have engineered. The point was underlined when Phil Collins walked up and introduced himself by saying, “How do you do, Dr. Kissinger? I’m Otis Redding.” Courteously, Kissinger, who had never lost his thick German accent, replied, “I luff your music, Otis.” Without missing a beat, Ahmet then dragged Kissinger off down the hall.
At midnight, Led Zeppelin finally took the stage for their long-awaited reunion performance. After flying in from London on the Concorde, Jimmy Page had spent six minutes rehearsing with his former band mates and John Bonham’s son and then insisted Atlantic rent the hotel suite next to his so he would not be disturbed by the telephone. Opening their thirty-one-minute set with “Kashmir,” the band also performed “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven.” The celebration continued after the show at a party where at five in the morning Ahmet said, “I’m a happy man.”
Some days later, Ahmet sent Jerry Wexler a form letter on Atlantic Records Fortieth Anniversary stationery in which he wrote, “Dear Jerry, Thank you for being involved in the fortieth anniversary of Atlantic Records. Having so many members of the Atlantic family under one roof was a thrill that I do not expect to ever be repeated in my lifetime. I want you to know that your participation had very special meaning for me and I will always remember it. With warmest personal regards and much love, Sincerely, Ahmet.”
Unfortunately, as Wexler would later say, “I declined to appear at Atlantic’s fortieth anniversary. Because of the way it was being produced for television, they were going to drag me out like a wooden Indian and use me as a prop. It was all Ahmet and there was no sense of collegiality. So I didn’t go.” When Wexler received Ahmet’s letter, in the words of Jerry Greenberg, “He went crazy.”