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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 wi
th 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.”
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