Clad in a straw hat, a flannel shirt, and dark shades, Dylan described the party to a New York Times reporter by saying, “It’s encompassing . . . it’s the beginning of cosmic consciousness.” Calling the party “a Felliniesque finale to the Stones tour,” the reporter noted that the guest list read “like a Who’s Who of guest lists.” Working together, Mica and Mick Jagger had come up with a once-in-a-lifetime collection of people who represented both the high and the low life Ahmet had always loved, as well as all the disparate worlds in which he felt very much at home.
Gianni Bulgari, Andrea de Portago, Oscar and Françoise de la Renta, Graziella Lobo, Count Vega del Ren, Ceezee and Winston Guest, Caterine Milinaire, Lady “Slim” Keith, Lord Hesketh of Easton Neston Castle, Diana Vreeland, Bill Blass, Bill and Chessy Rayner, Bobby Short, Kenneth Jay Lane, Kitty Hawks, Freddie and Isabel Eberstadt, and Clyde and Maggie Newhouse were there, as were Woody Allen, Carly Simon, Dick Cavett, George Plimpton, Jerry Wexler, Bill Graham, and Tennessee Williams.
As Mario Medious, who snuck Peter Wolf and the J. Geils Band in through the kitchen by having them pretend to be roadies carrying Muddy Waters’s amps, would later say, “It was an unbelievable society trip because Ahmet was into that. Ahmet had to do that because Ahmet is the man. Ahmet is The Man, you dig? People stepped back when he walked in. When I walked in, I was just another motherfucker.”
At three in the morning as Count Basie and his band played, one of Andy Warhol’s female superstars popped out of Mick Jagger’s five-foot-high birthday cake wearing nothing but a pair of minuscule black pasties on her breasts and a garter on her right leg. A group of old black tap dancers in white pants, boaters, and white four-in-hand ties carrying white canes led by Sandman Sims then performed. They were followed by Muddy Waters, who had written the song from which the Stones had taken their name.
Some of those who had spent six weeks on the road working day and night to ensure the tour would be a success were not amused. “It’s a travesty; well, it’s ironic,” Peter Rudge said. “I wonder how many of them bought tickets. This has been a rock ’n’ roll tour for the kids and a social tour for everybody else.” In Bill Wyman’s words, “Society finally accepted us on that tour. I couldn’t care less. I’m not very interested in society. If they want to make out they like us, it’s okay with me. But I’m not playing music for society.”
As people partied until five in the morning on the Starlight Roof of the St. Regis that night, one era was most definitely ending as another began. Through the force of his personality and the wide-ranging connections he and Mica had made in high society, Ahmet had brought the Rolling Stones into a brand-new universe even they did not yet fully understand. As Peter Rudge recalled, “Ahmet and Mick crossed rock ’n’ roll over into mainstream culture. They had the same agenda. They truly, truly did.”
While the party had none of the authentic soul of the truly joyous celebration Ahmet had put on for the Stones in New Orleans, it did serve to elevate his own standing. No longer just a legend within the record business, Ahmet had now transformed himself into as great a star as any artist who had ever recorded for his label.
5
Though no one knew it at the time, the Rolling Stones had hit their creative peak while recording Exile on Main St. Their next three albums on Atlantic, Goats Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, and Black and Blue, spawned hit singles and sold more than enough copies to justify the label’s continuing investment in the band. But critics complained the Stones had lost their way and were now following musical trends rather than setting them as they had once done.
Continuing to do just as he pleased in the studio, Mick Jagger gave Ahmet fits by writing a song for Goats Head Soup entitled “Starfucker” that contained sexually suggestive lyrics referring to movie star Steve McQueen. Fearing a lawsuit, the label’s attorneys urged Ahmet to remove the song from the album. Knowing the title would guarantee the song would never be played on the radio in the United States or England and many American outlets would refuse even to distribute an album with visible profanity on the back over, Ahmet used all his powers of persuasion to convince Jagger to change the name of the song to “Star Star.”
When the band’s five-year contract with Atlantic expired in 1976, the Rolling Stones were once again free to sign with another label. Because Ahmet considered Jagger “a very close personal friend . . . I told him the Stones should make a killing on this contract, because, to be realistic by the time of the next contract they’ll be near forty, and one can’t be sure what will happen then. So I advised him.”
When Robert Stigwood began trying to persuade the Stones to sign with RSO Records and Polygram, Ahmet was forced to compete for the band. From his suite at the Plaza-Athenée Hotel in Paris, Stigwood conducted negotiations by phone with Jagger, who was staying at the equally posh Georges V. Writing down Stigwood’s latest offer, Jagger would then relay the terms to Rupert Lowenstein in Beverly Hills so he could use them to leverage more money from Atlantic.
Despite his long-standing relationship with Jagger, Ahmet had to come up with a $7 million advance for the band’s next five albums to keep the Stones on his label. On February 16, 1977, the Rolling Stones signed a new five-year deal with Atlantic to distribute their records in America while selling the rights outside the U.S. to EMI. As Ahmet would later say, “And what happened was that they got so much for the European rights, and so forth, that they could stay with Atlantic in America.”
A year later thanks to Jagger, Ahmet found himself embroiled in a very public controversy that threatened to destroy his reputation as a champion of black music. In June 1978, the Stones released Some Girls. With Ronnie Wood of the Faces having replaced Mick Taylor on lead guitar and Jagger now playing guitar as well, the album fused elements of punk rock and disco and sold more than six million copies in the United States, making it the band’s most successful album in America.
Viewed by many as the aging dinosaurs of rock, the Stones had proved once again they had not yet lost their edge. When Keith Richards was asked why the Stones had chosen to call the album Some Girls, he replied, “Because we couldn’t remember their fucking names.” Although “Miss You,” the first single from the album, became the last Stones’ song to reach number one in America, Ahmet’s problems began as soon as the album was released.
The cover featured cut-out photographs of the Stones in drag along with a variety of female celebrities. Lucille Ball, Farrah Fawcett, Raquel Welch, Marilyn Monroe’s estate, and Liza Minnelli, representing her mother, Judy Garland, all objected to being portrayed in such a manner and threatened legal action. At great expense to both Atlantic and Rolling Stones Records, the cover was withdrawn and the album had to be reissued.
While that brouhaha cost everyone money, it was small potatoes compared to the controversy stirred up by the lyrics of the title track, which included the line, “Black girls just wanna get fucked all night.” As Jagger would later say, “I suppose we ask for it if we record things like that. Christ, I don’t do these things intentionally. I just wrote it . . . That’s real, and if girls can do that, I can certainly write about it, because it’s what I see.”
When Ahmet asked Jagger “to please change the lyrics,” he replied the song was about “a stupid guy talking” and was “supposed to be a satire.” In Ahmet’s words, “I said, ‘I don’t think people are going to understand that when they hear “black girls like to fuck all night.” ’ It came to a point where I couldn’t get him to change the lyrics, so I knew that trouble was going to come. But if I hadn’t put out the record the way it was, the Stones could have left the label. Our contract was set so that he had the right to put whatever he wanted in the records, as long as it wasn’t illegal—and it wasn’t illegal to say that.”
To Ahmet’s amazement, the album received excellent reviews and sold like crazy without anyone objecting to the lyrics. In his words, “I thought, ‘Jesus, we’ve gotten away with this,’ ” while also proving the Stones “had n
o black following.” Ahmet then got a call from his old friend Hal Jackson, the former deejay who, after cofounding the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation with Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton, had purchased WLIB, the first African American owned radio station in New York City, and then WBLS.
“Ahmet,” Jackson said, “I hate to tell you this, I’ve been deluged with complaints about this record. You’ve got to take it off the market.” After Ahmet explained that his contract with the Rolling Stones made it impossible for him to do so, Jackson told him he had received a letter of complaint signed by fifteen associations of Baptist women who considered Jagger’s lyrics offensve.
The issue ratcheted up to another level when the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who had marched from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. Martin Luther King and then founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), called to say, “Ahmet, you’re in a world of trouble.” Quickly going public with the issue, Jackson described the song as “vulgar and obscene” and “an insult to colored people.” Announcing he would soon be meeting with Mick Jagger and representatives of Atlantic Records about his complaint, Jackson added, “We do not want to act like censors but we feel that Mick Jagger has a social responsibility.”
Within a week of Hal Jackson’s initial call, Atlantic’s offices in Midtown Manhattan were being picketed by what Ahmet would later call “everybody you could possibly think of . . . even the Abyssinian Church.” Marching up and down the street with signs, the protesters urged everyone to boycott the label’s records.
On every level imaginable, Ahmet’s worst nightmare had now come real. Having built his label on music made by black artists for a black audience, he was now being confronted on a daily basis by black protesters demanding no one buy his records because a white band that had begun its career playing black rhythm and blues had insulted black womanhood. In practical terms, as Peter Rudge would later say, “Ahmet was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He could either piss off Mick or piss off the entire ethos on which Atlantic Records had been founded. Ahmet was consistent in that he didn’t want to take on Jesse Jackson or the black coalition because he would have had to answer to too many great Atlantic artists. That was not something Ahmet could live with and so he chose in my opinion to piss off Mick.”
Over the years, Atlantic had demonstrated its own sense of social responsibility by regularly contributing money to Jackson’s organization. In Jerry Wexler’s words, “He used to come up to my office for his taste and I would throw a check at him like a Hungarian cavalry officer throwing a bag of gold at his tailor. Ahmet and I had separate offices and I would call Ahmet on the intercom, and say, ‘Ahmet, he’s coming down. Don’t give. I gave already.’ While every social and political stance of his is good and admirable, he tried to subvert our artists and turn Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding against me so he could set up a picket line and get more money from me.”
According to Ahmet, who had always maintained a far better personal relationship with Jackson than Wexler did, it was Jackson who came up with a plan to solve Atlantic’s problem by advising Ahmet to come to Chicago to meet with the groups who had initiated the boycott. Ahmet brought with him his longtime assistant Noreen Woods, a black woman who was “like my guardian angel” as well as “a great friend” of Jesse Jackson. Before the meeting began, Jackson warned Ahmet that even though he was about to really light into him and curse him “and say horrible things,” Ahmet was to “just go ahead and calmly explain what this is about.”
“Scared to death” as he walked into the meeting to be confronted by “a sea of black faces—there must have been a hundred people there, all filled up with anger,” Ahmet would later say, “I thought I was going to be lynched. I was the only white person in the hall—and it was very scary.” Ahmet then began explaining he had no control over what the Rolling Stones recorded and that Mick Jagger was not a racist but “quite to the contrary: he has a black child.”
Playing his part to perfection, Jackson said, “Oh man, are you kidding me? . . . You go there, take advantage of black people, and on top of that, you take their money selling records . . . then you turn around and insult them like this. This is black womanhood you’re insulting.” In Ahmet’s words, Jackson then “started to insult me irrationally, and to such an extent that the crowd suddenly began to react against him—because I was calmly continuing on, while he was ranting and raving.” As the crowd began turning toward Ahmet, Jackson shifted gears and said, “On the other hand, Ahmet, you’ve done so much for so many black artists . . . you can’t control what this musician has done. I guess Jagger didn’t mean to say that . . . It might not be clear on the record, because you can hardly understand the lyrics.” In Ahmet’s words, “And suddenly, the whole thing had come to an end.”
Once everyone sat down to have lunch, people began coming over to ask Ahmet questions about Wilson Pickett and LaVern Baker, and “we all left as happy and contented as can be. Jesse is a genius, you know, because he had orchestrated this whole thing knowing that I had tried not to put out the record with that lyric. That man saved my life.”
Ahmet still had to pacify Hal Jackson, who said he would be willing to forget the entire incident if Jagger presented the award at Jackson’s 1979 Talented Teens International pageant in Los Angeles. Breaking his own rule of never being “pushy” with Jagger, Ahmet persuaded him to appear at the event and then flew to Los Angeles, where he called Jagger the day before his scheduled appearance to remind him about it.
Ahmet was about to have lunch with the socialite author Brooke Hayward when he received a frantic call from Hal Jackson saying he was at Jagger’s hotel but the singer could not be awakened. Ahmet rushed over to the hotel only to be told Jagger had been up all night partying and had only gone to bed an hour earlier. “I shouted at him,” Ahmet said. “I threw water at him, but nothing would wake him up.”
Furiously, Hal Jackson demanded that Ahmet come up with another celebrity to present the award or there would be “big trouble.” As he and Brooke Hayward had not yet had lunch, Ahmet directed his driver to take them to the Cocoanut Grove, where he persuaded Hayward to deliver an off-the-cuff speech to “a thousand expectant black teenage girls waiting for Mick Jagger.” Ahmet then had Noreen Woods talk about how she had worked her way up through the ranks at Atlantic and everyone went home happy.
Shortly before his death, Jerry Wexler would explain the real nature of the elaborate charade with Jesse Jackson in Chicago by saying, “Ahmet had to pay a million dollars to them. Ahmet told me he had to make a public mea culpa and then Jesse turned it around and defended him. The contribution had already been agreed upon and the deal was down. Jesse first had to kick Ahmet’s ass and then redeem him.”
Fulfilling their contract, the Stones went on to record Emotional Rescue, Tattoo You, and Undercover for Atlantic. By the time their second five-year deal with the label expired in 1983, in the words of Rupert Lowenstein, “I don’t think Atlantic was all that enchanted with the next contract, and I don’t think the Rolling Stones were all that enchanted with Ahmet. Familiarity breeds contempt. The excitement had gone.”
While Ahmet did fly to London to push the bidding higher, the Stones signed with CBS, a label headed by the explosive Walter Yetnikoff, a record executive whose penchant for screaming tirades and foul-mouthed invective made Jerry Wexler seem like a Boy Scout. In what was then the richest deal in the history of rock, the Stones received a $6 million advance for each of their next four albums as well as $4 million for publicity. In order for CBS to recoup its advance, each new album by the Stones would have to sell three million copies.
As Peter Rudge would later say, “It always shocked me Mick went there but Columbia and CBS were more powerful then than they had ever been before or afterwards. They were the big red Formula One machine, the one to get on, and Mick wanted to make money. When we signed with Atlantic, it was Ahmet’s record company. By 1984, it wasn’t anymore. Atlantic had served their purpose. Ahmet had served his pur
pose. The legacy of the Stones was secure. Then you cash in, don’t you?”
Unlike Yetnikoff, with whom the band would part company once their contract with CBS was done, Jagger and Ahmet remained close long after their business relationship was over. In Rudge’s words, “Mick is one of those people who doesn’t look back when he moves on. He’s not sentimental. The greatest tribute to Ahmet was that he and Mick remained lifelong friends.”
SIXTEEN
The Boy Wonder
“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
1
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.”
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