After graduating from Brown University, Kallman started his own record label, Big Beat, and released a series of hits that convinced Doug Morris to bring him in at Atlantic in 1991. “To me,” Kallman said, “Atlantic was the iconic label because Zeppelin had been my favorite band. I loved the Stones and Ray Charles and Aretha and when I walked into the building the first day, it was like walking into the sacred halls.” After Morris persuaded Kallman to sell Big Beat Records to Atlantic and join the company, Ahmet personally anointed Kallman as the last in a long line of his direct successors by telling the twenty-six-year-old entrepreneur, “We’re going to develop you to be president of Atlantic one day.”
Kallman’s eventual accession in 2002 was made more difficult by the digital revolution that had by then effectively destroyed the business Ahmet had spent his entire life building. In June 1999, Shawn Fanning, an eighteen-year-old student at Northeastern University in Boston, came up with a program that allowed people to share MP3 music files over the Internet for free.
Calling the program Napster after the nickname he had been given for his “nappy haircut,” Fanning made his online music file sharing service available free to all who wanted to use it. Napster soon attracted hordes of college students who began downloading music without paying for it. At its peak, the service was used by more than sixty million people who downloaded 2.79 billion songs—on which record companies did not collect a penny.
Rather than try to acquire the technology so they could use it themselves, the Recording Industry Association of America filed a federal lawsuit for copyright infringement against Napster in December 1999. Two years later, the file sharing service was shut down by order of a U.S. district court judge. By then, the damage had already been done. As Bill Curbishley would note, “It was like the record companies lived in this illusory world where they had built this castle on a mountain with a moat around it that was impregnable and no one was ever going to get in. And then lo and behold, someone dropped in by parachute. It was as simple as that. They shot themselves in the head. None of them paid any attention to the new technology and the Internet until it was much too late.”
In 2000, the record industry sold 785 million albums on CD and vinyl. Over the next eight years, sales fell 45 percent. As one industry analyst noted, “The Titanic that is physical media started slowly sinking in 2000. Certainly this is a traumatic event for those who worked there, but it’s an expected product of the digital transformation.”
That anyone could now download a single track from any album also put an end to the product that for the past four decades had been the mainstay of the industry. As David Geffen described the new reality: “What made the record business was that when the LP came out, it went from being a singles business to an album business. And now it’s turned it back into a singles business and that’s a miserable business. There’s still musical talent and there always will be and music is more a part of people’s lives than it has ever been before but unfortunately, it’s free. Try and compete with free. There will always be a record business and there will always be people paying for music but as long as it’s convenient to steal it, why not steal it?”
Two years after Steve Jobs of Apple announced the creation of iTunes on January 9, 2001, the iTunes store began selling individual tracks online for 99 cents (a dime more than the price of a single during the era of independent record labels). No longer able to earn a living from record sales, musicians began relying on revenue from live performances as well as the direct sale of CDs in order to survive. With consumers now able to view and listen to music for free on YouTube, Myspace, and Facebook, artists trying to break into the business no longer needed to audition for record company executives because they could sell their music directly online.
While rock superstars like U2, Radiohead, and Pearl Jam were still able to market albums in a variety of new ways, their sales were a fraction of what they had once been. In the words of one management executive, “There’s a prevailing wisdom that many established acts don’t need a record label anymore. This is the new frontier. This is the beginning of a new era for the music business.”
Although the digital revolution did not affect Ahmet personally, it did wreak havoc at the Warner Music Group. In desperate need of cash to pay off corporate debt incurred by its disastrous merger with AOL in 2000 and fearing the record industry would never return to the levels of profitability it had once generated, Time Warner sold the division for $2.6 billion in 2003 to a private investment group headed by Edgar Bronfman Jr.
Bronfman then persuaded Lyor Cohen, the forty-four-year-old head of the Island Def Jam Music Group to run the division. As Cohen would later say, “The basic architecture and plans of Def Jam were really written by Ahmet and Jerry Wexler. We started out as a rap label and through that, we attracted a lot of rock ’n’ roll artists. Which is similar to Atlantic because jazz had been the rap music of that moment in time.”
The son of Israeli immigrants, Cohen had been born in New York and then grew up in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. After graduating from the University of Miami, where he studied global marketing, Cohen began promoting shows in Los Angeles featuring rap artists and bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He then began working for Russell Simmons in New York and soon made a reputation for himself as a white man who could handle himself in a black world as the road manager for Run-DMC.
Nicknamed “Little Lansky” by rap producer Irv Gotti, Cohen became the president of Def Jam Records in 1988. When Doug Morris and the Universal Music Group purchased the label in 1999, Cohen earned $100 million. He then ran the Def Jam, Island, Roc-a-Fella, and Lost Highway labels, whose combined earnings amounted to nearly $700 million a year.
A few months before being named the head of the Warner Music Group, Cohen had come to Ahmet “because I had this wonderful artist named Kanye West and he really wanted to have Aretha Franklin on his debut album. So I ran over to Ahmet and played it for him and he went absolutely ga-ga and tried to get her to do it. At this point, Kanye was nobody and even though Ahmet was so convincing, she rejected the idea. But he said, ‘This is amazing. This artist is going to be someone special.’ He got it immediately.”
After Atlantic and Elektra were merged into a single label in 2004, Cohen had “to right-size the company” by letting “many, many people go. My whole life, I had been hiring people and this was my first experience of letting people go and I experienced a lot of mild depression so I said, ‘The way I’m going to pay myself back is that I am going to have lunch with Ahmet twice a week,’ and we started getting into a routine.”
Voicing what he had long been feeling about his role at Atlantic but had only expressed in private, Ahmet told Cohen “no one utilized him anymore and he felt completely marginalized. No one talked to him.” While in part this was due to Ahmet’s age and legendary status in the business, the problem had been exacerbated because “the previous regime had built an executive wing that separated the executives from the company and so it created even more isolation.”
In Cohen’s words, “What Ahmet needed was youth and excitement. He needed to keep teaching. So I reactivated him. I knocked down the walls of the executive wing and suddenly, it was like a stent in the heart. The blood started moving again and inside of a few months he went from a really awkward walk to a much stronger walk. Literally. He started to look better, feel better, straighten up, and have a real step in his walk.”
Over lunch served by a butler in a white suit in Ahmet’s office, the two men would regularly meet to talk about a variety of subjects, foremost among them Atlantic’s precipitous fall to sixth place in record sales. Ahmet “made me swear to him I was going to do everything in my power to resurrect Atlantic. Atlantic was dead. I should say it was dying which is worse than dead because you know it’s coming and it was very depressing for him. He wanted me to fire all the A&R people and all the management.”
To bring the label back to its former prominence, Cohen named Jason
Flom as the chairman of the label with Craig Kallman as his cochairman. After Flom, who was “not getting along with Lyor” left the label, Cohen paired Kallman with chief operating officer Julie Greenwald. Having begun her career in the record business as Cohen’s assistant at Def Jam, Greenwald assumed essentially the same role Miriam Bienstock had occupied at Atlantic four decades earlier.
As Kallman would later say, “When Edgar and Lyor took over, they were able to clear up the morass and confusion and bring Atlantic back to the way it was when I got there. They also brought Ahmet back. Basically, they said it’s all about the music and A&R and the artists and focusing on what matters. Which is the talent. Finding the best talent and making great records and having the best delivery system. They did a stunning job in the face of a collapsing business.”
In 2008, Atlantic would become the first record label to sell more than 50 percent of its music as digital files. By signing artists to “360 deals” that gave the company a share of all their touring and merchandising revenue, Kallman and Greenwald managed to resuscitate the company by reestablishing the kind of hands-on relationships with musicians that had once been Ahmet’s stock-in-trade.
On February 21, 2005, Ahmet was interviewed for an hour by Charlie Rose on his PBS show. Eighty-one years old and wearing a thickly knotted yellow challis tie with a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, Ahmet discussed a variety of topics, among them the current state of soccer, Turkey’s role in the modern world, and the astonishing volume of great music Atlantic had released over the last fifty-eight years.
Speaking in an occasionally halting manner but still sharp, Ahmet had the air of a dignified elder statesman who had spent his life negotiating alliances in a business he understood as well as anyone who had ever lived. When Rose asked him how he felt about Ray, the Taylor Hackford film about Ray Charles for which Jamie Foxx had won the Academy Award as Best Actor in 2004, Ahmet diplomatically said, “It’s a very difficult thing to direct a great film about a great artist and I think the film is very moving . . . People ask me, ‘Is that what happened?’ I say, ‘If that were what happened, it would be called a documentary and neither you nor I would have seen it.’ ”
Four days later, Ahmet, who earlier in the month had been honored with the first Grammy Industry Icon Award, told a reporter from the online magazine Slate that while he liked the actor who had portrayed him in Ray and thought director Taylor Hackford had “made a terrific movie, you must realize that I’m not the kind of shy little guy as portrayed in the movie. I don’t care what the man looks like or anything but it should have been somebody hip.”
Ahmet’s initial reaction to his portrayal by actor Curtis Armstrong, whose big break had come in Revenge of the Nerds, had been far more visceral. After Mica and Barbara Howar had accompanied Ahmet to a special screening of Ray arranged for him by Hackford in Los Angeles, Ahmet was, in Howar’s words, “absolutely crazed. We couldn’t shut him up. He was like, ‘I have never worn clothes like that! I’ve never worn a double-breasted suit! Two-toned shoes!’ Mica was going, ‘Ahmet! Ahmet! Ahmet!’ He was crazed and he stayed crazed and angry the entire night.”
As they walked into a restaurant in West Hollywood after the screening to have dinner with Hackford, “Mica said to me, ‘You keep Taylor occupied and I’ll try to keep Ahmet quiet.’ Mica and I were like two colonels keeping Ahmet separated from Taylor.” As Jerry Wexler, portrayed in the film by Richard Schiff, who had played presidential assistant Toby Ziegler in the long-running NBC series The West Wing, said, “Ray was terrible. I felt the same way about it as Ahmet. We were stick figures. Just a couple of suits.”
Having spent years working on the project before filming began, Taylor Hackford had spent countless hours interviewing Ahmet about the early days at Atlantic and had become part of Ahmet and Mica’s social circle. As the director noted, “The best time to talk to Ahmet was at two in the morning after he’d had many vodkas and the stories came out.” Acknowledging that Ahmet did not like the way he was portrayed in the movie, in which Ray Charles called him “Omelet,” as Otis Redding had actually done, Hackford said, “Eventually, Ahmet hosted a screening in New York and once people began recognizing him in airports after the movie became a hit, he got into it.”
Though far fewer people saw it, Ahmet had also been portrayed in Beyond the Sea, the 2004 Bobby Darin biopic written and directed by Academy Award–winning actor Kevin Spacey, who also played the lead role. For reasons known only to him, Spacey chose a forty-six-year-old Turkish actor named Tayfun Bademsoy to play Ahmet. With a full head of dark hair and the wrong kind of goatee, Bademsoy bore no resemblance to the way Ahmet had looked in 1958.
The single funniest cinematic moment in which Ahmet was involved occurs in Frank Zappa’s 1971 movie 200 Motels. Zappa, who was so fond of Ahmet that he named one of his sons after him, had asked Ahmet to play the part of a business executive in the film but when he was unable to do so, Zappa worked him into the script by having one of his leading characters say, “Ahmet Ertegun used this towel as a bathmat six weeks ago at a rancid motel in Orlando, Florida . . . It’s still damp. What an aroma!” Snorting it, the character then got stoned out of his mind.
TWENTY-ONE
“The Encore Was Heaven”
“When Ahmet dies, he will have squeezed the tube of life completely dry. And they’ll have to bury him facedown or he’ll dig his way out.”
—Doug Morris
1
In November 2005, Ahmet joined about eighty people who had worked at Atlantic Records over the years for a reunion in Las Vegas. Ahmet was busily trading stories with Jerry Greenberg about the good old days when Susan Joseph, Laura Branigan’s former manager, who had won a judgment against the artist for $600,000 and then forced Ahmet to pay her the money out of the singer’s royalties, sat down at his table. In Joseph’s words, “He was an old man and I wanted to be polite and I went to sit with Jerry Greenberg and Ahmet said, ‘I’d like you to leave my table,’ and I said, ‘No problem.’ ”
The following summer, Ahmet was honored at the opening night concert of the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, which he and Nesuhi had helped Claude Nobs found in 1967. As Kid Rock would later say, “It was like a tribute to Ahmet and he invited all the people he wanted to sing over there. Robert Plant. Stevie Nicks. Me. George Duke. Stevie Winwood. Chic.” After throwing a party “in this mackin’ suite Ahmet got me overlooking the lake,” Rock was arrested by Swiss police, who mistakenly believed he had stabbed an intruder who had broken into singer Chaka Khan’s suite only to have her beat him up with an umbrella.
When Ahmet, who himself was out after every show in Montreux eating dinner long past midnight, called the next morning to invite Kid Rock to his suite to watch a soccer game, Rock told him he had just gotten out of jail. “I’ve never heard someone cuss people out in so many different languages. He was laughing but he was upset. Once we had lunch, he called Claude Nobs. ‘The show’s fucking canceled! Who the fuck takes my artist to jail? There’ll be no Robert Plant tonight! No anybody!’ Then he’s calling someone in French, cussing them out, and I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ Turned out the mayor sent me a free watch for my trouble. A Swiss watch. Ahmet thought that was the funniest thing ever.”
Before a marathon show that also featured Paolo Nutini—the Scottish singer who was “the last new Atlantic artist Ahmet really embraced and took under his wing”—performing with Ben E. King, Ahmet attended the sound check that afternoon. In the words of longtime Atlantic publicist Bob Kaus, “Ahmet didn’t like the way it was sounding and he kept telling the bass player to turn down. Finally, he walked back to the board and basically mixed the live sound himself. He was yelling at the sound guy, ‘This sounds terrible! You need more guitar! The bass is too boomy! We have to fix this. I have unhappy artists here.’ And he made it right and the show was phenomenal. It was as if he was sitting in the studio listening to every detail and making a great record.”
On Saturday night, August 1, cl
ad in a houndstooth sport jacket, a white shirt, white linen pants, and brown shoes, Ahmet got onstage with his cane in hand to sing with Stevie Nicks, Robert Plant, and Nile Rodgers of Chic during the finale. After Stevie Winwood performed a moving solo rendition of Ray Charles’s “Georgia” and Ahmet came onstage to acknowledge his award, his hand kept shaking as he held the microphone.
Two months later, on October 9, Ahmet sat down in his Manhattan town house with the English singer James Blunt, who “at that moment was Atlantic’s biggest star,” for his final interview with Susan Steinberg, the director who for the past three years had been working on a documentary entitled Atlantic Records: The House That Ahmet Built for the American Masters series on PBS.
Steinberg, who had been an editor and assistant on Gimme Shelter, Woodstock, and Cocksucker Blues, structured the film around conversations between Ahmet and Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, David Geffen, Lyor Cohen, Chris Blackwell, Phil Collins, Wynton Marsalis, Ben E. King, and Ray Charles, who died shortly after his segment was shot. Narrated by Bette Midler, the project was produced by Ahmet’s old friend Phil Carson, who had previously produced the Sun Records documentary, Good Rockin’ Tonight, for the American Masters series.
After Blunt left Ahmet’s town house that day, Steinberg said, “Ahmet, we would love some shots of you just listening to music.” As Bob Kaus would later say, “They put on a Louis Armstrong CD and without looking at the liner notes, Ahmet identified when it was recorded and who was playing every instrument. He closed his eyes and was completely transported. All of a sudden, it was as if there were no cameras there. Ahmet was completely in another time and space.”
The Last Sultan Page 42