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 c
harge 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.
2
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 a
nd 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.
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