The mogul who changed pop music
Ahmet Ertegun, founder of the great rhythm and blues label Atlantic, had the good grace not to correct one of his biggest stars, Otis Redding, when he pronounced his name “Omelette.” Then again, Ertegun was the quintessential smooth and shrewd operator, an aristocrat at home with grit and funk as well as high society.
Consider his story of bailing out Keith Richards, best man at Mick Jagger’s wedding in France: Keith was “walking around with a bag full of coke, scooping it out with his hand and shoving it in his face. The chief of police came up to him and said in French, ‘What is this powder?’ Keith had this dumbfounded look on his face. Reaching into the bag, I grabbed some, started patting it on Keith’s face, and said in French, ‘You don’t understand. They’re not just musicians. They’re also clowns. And this is their makeup.’ ”
Now that is the quintessence of cool. And when Ertegun, the son of the Turkish ambassador to the U.S., was growing up he thought the coolest music was rhythm and blues and jazz, eventually creating the label that recorded such seminal artists as Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, the Clovers, the Drifters, the Coasters and Clyde Mcphatter. He later hit the motherlode with Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, both of whom signed with Atlantic because they grew up on the label’s records. (His brother Nesuhi – whom Redding pronounced “Nescafe” – ran Atlantic’s jazz division, which thrived with the mainstreaming of the Modern Jazz Quartet and John Coltrane.)
His colourful career, which amounts to a history of rock ’n’ roll (a term blacks considered synonymous with rhythm and blues) – music and business – is recounted in Robert Greenfield’s entertaining The Last Sultan (Simon & Schuster).
While other smaller regional labels waxed black music, Atlantic brought it into the mainstream. It is often forgotten that Aretha Franklin recorded for Columbia, but she was saddled largely with show tunes; when she moved to Atlantic, Ertegun and his legendary producer Jerry Wexler had her sing R&B and soul, and her hits (particularly Respect) became anthems.
Ertegun was also shrewd. When he lost his bid to sign San Francisco psychedelic band Moby Grape, after promising them an unprecedented release of three singles from their debut album, because Columbia arch rival Clive Davis offered twice the money, he was delighted to read in Billboard that the group’s album was coming out with three singles because Moby Grape “made (Columbia) do it. Which is one of the reasons that the record didn’t make it.” A classic case of overkill.
He transformed himself from a geeky music fan in a zoot suit in the ’40s to one of New York’s most sartorially splendiferous celebrities.
Unlike today’s corporate types, who wouldn’t know music-in-the raw if it slapped them in the face, Ertegun made the scene, from southern roadhouses to ghetto dives to rock dens, from the El Morocco to Studio 54; when the Twist was a craze, there he was at the Peppermint Lounge twisting the night away (inspiring him to repackage and re-title albums as Do the Twist with Ray Charles and Twist with Bobby Darin). Toward the end of his life he was gallivanting around Manhattan with Kid Rock, whom he thought of as a son.
Probably his most culturally significant achievement was nurturing Ray Charles and presenting him to the mainstream. Whereas black music had always been consigned to regional markets, Charles’s hits (What’d I Say, I Got a Woman) marked the start of the great cross-pollination between black and white that defined popular music to come. When Charles left Atlantic for Abc-paramount in 1960 – and a contract giving him an astounding 75 cents on every dollar – Ertegun was heartbroken, a douleur he never got over.
He knew how to press the right buttons, for devilish fun or ruthless profit. His relationship with future record and film mogul David Geffen was thorny (albeit in a love-hate way). When Geffen took a phone call from Joni Mitchell in Ertegun’s hotel suite, Ertegun told New Yorker writer George Trow, who was researching a legendary 60-page article on him, “He must be talking to an artist. He’s got his soulful look on. He’s trying to purge at this moment all traces of his eager greed.” When Geffen saw the article, he went berserk, eventually accusing Ertegun of antiSemitism (a ridiculous claim, in light of the many Jews that Ertegun brought in to help build Atlantic in its early years).
In Greenfield’s telling, Ertegun always had a leg up on the artists and was a master manipulator of ego. When he was about to sign the Stones, he suggested to Mick Jagger that he ditch girlfriend Marianne Faithfull because her heroin habit might have ramifications on the group’s future.
One aspect that Greenfield barely touches is payola, which has been endemic in the record business since Day 1. Payola and assorted fraudulent accounting practices is what sank Stax Records, the great Memphis soul label that Atlantic distributed in the mid-60s. Soulsville U.S.A., by Rob Bowman (Schirmer), chronicles Stax’s heroic rise – with Booker T. & the MGS, Otis Redding, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Sam & Dave, Johnnie Taylor and, of course, Isaac Hayes – and tragic fall. The glory days of the ’60s accounted for the most readily identifiable “sound” in R&B (or even all of pop) – gritty no-frills funk performed with great taste.
But then the company, under megalomaniac vice-president Al Bell, tried to diversify to become a “full-service” label and failed miserably. With that came astonishing financial scams and poor alliances (being distributed by giant Columbia, which thought of Stax as small potatoes, was deadly) that drove the company under. The amount of money lavished on Hayes – who scored the label’s biggest albums with Hot Buttered Soul and Shaft – wound up being untenable. The last half of Soulsville U.S.A. is a fascinating account of lawsuits, court cases, banking records and shady deals that amounts to a devastating description of record business mis-modus operandi.
Then again, the music is forever (probably more so than Atlantic’s – save for Ray Charles), and it’s no accident that Stax’s greatest records continue to inspire musicians and entertain audience to this day.