April 17, 2007. In the tiny village New York can sometimes become when it honors one of its own who has fulfilled the dream of hope on which the city was built, the all-star tribute to Ahmet Ertegun scheduled to begin at six P.M. in the Rose Theater at the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle was the talk of the town. Those who had labored long and hard to bring about what promised to be the event of the season as well as one of those once-in-a-lifetime evenings that could never happen anywhere else, literally could not think about anything else.
In his office at Rolling Stone magazine, Jann Wenner, who along with film director Taylor Hackford was producing the event, nervously wondered whether his old friend Mick Jagger was going to perform this evening. Ensconced in a suite at the Carlyle Hotel, Jagger, who had lost his ninety-three-year-old father only a few months earlier, was incommunicado. Making matters worse, Wenner had just learned that Keith Richards, who had been scheduled to do “Sixty Minute Man” by Billy Ward and the Dominoes at the tribute, had gone to England to be with his ailing mother and so would not be able to perform.
The invitation-only tribute was still the hottest ticket in town. Entry to the private party following the event at The Boat House in Central Park was so tightly controlled that those who feared they would not be allowed to attend either function were frantically doing all they could to wangle their way on to the guest list even at the very last minute.
Faced with the daunting task of doling out twelve hundred free tickets to an event that could have easily filled a much larger venue, Ahmet’s assistant Frances Chantly had unwittingly turned up the pressure by insisting there be no reserved seating. To her way of thinking, those who truly loved Ahmet would be there early.
Showing no respect for the dead, a reporter from the New York Post’s always scurrilous “Page Six” gossip column, which had previously run a blind item about an aging record executive with a cane engaging in scandalous behavior with two women, called Ahmet’s grieving widow at home that afternoon to ask if it was true that other women who were involved with her late husband would be at the tribute. As always, Mica Ertegun patiently explained that Americans did not understand how European women viewed such matters.
While she had not yet been able to bring herself to watch PBS’s American Masters documentary about Ahmet, the film had been shown the night before at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. On the afternoon of the tribute, the documentary was shown again in a plush screening room at the Time Warner Center where cellophane-wrapped cookies bearing Ahmet’s likeness from Eleni’s Bakery were given to invited guests along with a 60th Anniversary Atlantic Records commemorative CD distributed by Starbucks featuring seventeen songs Ahmet had selected before his death.
Many of those who attended the screening decided the wisest course of action was to just wait there until the tribute began. Patiently, they then stood in line before a brace of secretaries who checked their names off lists before allowing them to board elevators to the fifth-floor theater. Leaving no doubt the stars had come out tonight for Ahmet and it was only in New York that such an event could have taken place, Tom Wolfe strolled through the lobby as Helen Mirren stepped from the elevator to join the crowd waiting to enter the theater. Standing in a long line of well-coiffed women in elegant dresses carrying little handbags suspended from gold chains and silver-haired captains of industry in expensive suits and dark blue blazers, the punk singer and poet Patti Smith looked incongruous yet somehow also at home.
Wearing black, Mica Ertegun sat in the front row of the theater with Ahmet’s family and many of the artists who were scheduled to perform. As people filled the seats, there was a good deal of air-kissing, embracing, and handshaking across the rows. A large photograph of Ahmet stood on a bare stage framed by small trees. Befitting the course of his career, the program began with jazz.
Followed by horn players and two drummers, Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and a member of the selection committee of the Jazz Hall of Fame Ahmet had founded in his brother Nesuhi’s name in 2004, walked through a side door playing trumpet like the second coming of Louis Armstrong on “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble,” a number often performed by New Orleans brass bands on their way back from a funeral.
Larger than life and sitting on a gilded throne in a three-piece suit, the great soul singer Solomon Burke spoke of “the little Turkish prince, our beloved brother Ahmet.” Eric Clapton, whom Ahmet had first heard play forty years earlier at the Scotch of St. James in London, then took the stage. Wearing glasses with his hair closely cropped, Clapton said, “I loved Ahmet. He was like a father to me. In the old days, we’d have a drink and do some other things and any time that happened, he would start singing songs to me . . . We’re going to do two of the songs he always sang—‘Send Me Someone to Love’ and the other by Sticks McGhee called ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-dee-O-Dee.’ ”
Backed by Dr. John on piano, a drummer, and a bass player, Clapton performed masterful versions of both songs. He then gave way to New York City’s billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg, who concluded his remarks by declaring, “And let us say, Ah-met!” The mayor was followed by Henry Kissinger, Bette Midler, Ben E. King, Kid Rock, and Sam Moore of Sam and Dave. After describing Ahmet as “a ducker and diver” who gave up his student visa to remain in America so he could make his life in music, Taylor Hackford introduced a videotaped statement by an ailing Jerry Wexler in Florida.
Looking old and gaunt in a soft brown sailor’s cap, glasses, and a green shirt without a collar, Wexler talked about Ahmet’s sense of “irony and tomfoolery” and how he could be speaking in French to the French ambassador only to hang up the phone to greet a black musician by saying, “Hey, homes, what you know good?” Saying he did not know if he had ever specifically thanked Ahmet for giving him a life by making him a partner at Atlantic when he “had no qualifications whatsoever and no experience,” Wexler stared directly into the camera and, with the New York street accent he had never lost, said, “Ahmet, thank you for opening the door for me. Thank you.”
On a completely black stage, Phil Collins sat down at the piano to perform a stunning version of “In the Air Tonight,” the song Ahmet had helped make a hit. After David Geffen told his classic and oft-repeated “bumping-into-geniuses” story about Ahmet, Stevie Nicks sang “Stand Back” and her version of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock ’n’ Roll.”
Jann Wenner read a letter from Keith Richards in which the Stones’ guitarist said he had looked up to Ahmet as he did to Muddy Waters. Then Wenner talked about Ahmet’s formative role in the creation of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He also recalled that when he asked Mica why Ahmet had looked so well while he was lying in a coma in the hospital, she told him, “Well, he hasn’t been drinking.” Bette Midler then returned to do her version of Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea.”
More than two hours into the proceedings, Mick Jagger stepped to the podium. In a suit, a white shirt, and no tie, with his long hair trailing over his ears, a relaxed Jagger delivered what most people agreed was the best speech of the evening. Obviously enjoying himself, he began his remarks by saying, “Ahmet was a father figure, this is true. But to me, he was more like the wicked uncle with the wicked chuckle.”
Addressing what he called “a diverse and fascinating group of people like ourselves,” Jagger noted how only Ahmet could talk about geopolitics and medieval Islamic history and then pick the next Vanilla Fudge single. Jagger ended his remarks by reminiscing about a party during the 1970s when Ahmet had volunteered to hire strippers to entertain the Rolling Stones and then contacted an agency called the Widows Club who provided “rotund women of a certain age who stripped for free on the weekends.”
Crosby, Stills, and Nash then took the stage. With Graham Nash on mouth harp and Stephen Stills on guitar, they did their version of the Beatles’ “In My Life.” Nash then said, “Here’s our friend Neil.” Hulking and stoop-shouldered with long hair and gray sideburns, Neil Young played acoustic guitar on “Helplessly Hoping.” After the song ended, Nash said, “Here’s something you don’t see every day. I’m looking forward to this myself. This is Neil and Stephen doing a Buffalo Springfield song.” He and Crosby then left the stage.
Leaning into the microphone, Young said, “Ahmet was our man. I just hope that today’s musicians have someone like Ahmet taking care of them. Mica, thank you so much for taking care of him.” Without having rehearsed it, Stills and Young then began playing “Mr. Soul,” the classic Buffalo Springfield song Young had written in 1966 but the two men had not performed together in forty years.
Playing rhythm with so much intensity that he became a one-man band, Young sang in a haunting voice as Stills picked out the leads on his white Washburn electric guitar. Together, they created the kind of musical magic for which Ahmet had lived. When they were done, Young put his hands together and looked up at the heavens as though to give thanks the performance had all come out right in the end.
Ending the tribute nearly three hours after it began, Wynton Marsalis walked down the aisle playing “Down by the Riverside.” As though they were now in a church, the crowd got to their feet and began clapping their hands in time. At the party that followed, Kid Rock and Dave Mason of Traffic, backed by Paul Shaffer’s band, performed “Feelin’ Alright” and Solomon Burke sang “Cry to Me.”
While the evening was, as Eric Clapton wrote in his autobiography, both “entertaining and emotionally stirring,” the guitarist also noted, “I still felt that had Ahmet been there in the flesh, he would have said something like, ‘Let’s get out of here and find the real shit.’ ”
Once he had found it, Ahmet would have drained every glass set before him and tapped his foot in time to the beat while telling the stories he loved best. Staying until the last note of music had been played, he would not have made his way home until the sun was rising. And then, just as he had always done while running Atlantic Records for seven decades, Ahmet would have checked in to see how his business was doing.
Like the subject of the song Wynton Marsalis had played to begin the tribute, Ahmet Ertegun had rambled in and out of town. He had rambled through the city and the street. Throughout the course of his long and astonishing life, Ahmet had rambled all around.