The Last Sultan Page 12

  “In those days, we were desperate for hits,” Ahmet would later say, “but we didn’t have the money to tour the South and the Midwest looking for blues singers so we signed up people in New York, Baltimore, and Washington. Most of these singers were very sophisticated and didn’t want to record what I knew our audience—the black audience—wanted to hear. The lead singer of the Clovers wanted to do the syrupy ballads Billy Eckstine was recording. While we wouldn’t have had a chance against Eckstine, we needed records that were halfway soulful. And that’s what we got, with songs that were and artists that weren’t and that something in between caught on with the white kids. They wouldn’t buy Sonny Boy Williamson, B. B. King, or Muddy Waters but they would buy Ruth Brown, the Clovers, the Coasters, the Drifters, and Clyde McPhatter. Our music was soulful but it was also urban. It was in fact the music that grew into rock and roll.”

  The man who did the most to create the early Atlantic sound was Jesse Stone. Astonishingly good-looking, with large deep-set eyes, elflike ears, and hair cut close to the skull and parted in the middle, Stone’s grandfather was a slave who became the first black man in Kansas to own a Cadillac. Beginning his musical career as a piano player and an arranger, Stone had cut his first record for Okeh in 1927. A good friend of Duke Ellington, with whom he stayed for four months after coming to New York, Stone worked as the bandleader at the Apollo while also writing and arranging material for big bands led by Chick Webb and Jimmie Lunceford. Stone’s song “Idaho” was a big hit for both Benny Goodman and Guy Lombardo.

  Although they came from entirely different worlds, Cole Porter was a major influence on Stone’s songwriting. When they met, Porter asked Stone, “What tools do you use?” Having never heard of a rhyming dictionary, Stone replied, “Hell, if you’re gonna dig a ditch, you use a shovel, don’t you?” After Porter hipped him to homonyms, assonance, and alliteration, Stone “began to approach songwriting more professionally.”

  Like Tom Dowd, Stone had worked with Herb Abramson at National. The two men wanted to form their own record label but neither had the money and so their plans went nowhere. Through his connection with Abramson, Stone brought the Harlemaires to Atlantic in 1947. Sax player Frank “Floor Show” Culley then had a hit with an instrumental version of Stone’s “Cole Slaw,” which had been originally recorded as “Sorghum Switch” by Jimmy Dorsey and then by Louis Jordan, who gave the song its new title.

  “Jesse Stone,” Ahmet would later say, “did more to develop the basic rock ’n’ roll sound than anybody else, although you hear a lot about Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. He was a great, reliable, loose arranger, who could update a five-year-old arrangement with a couple of chord changes. Those arrangements were very important, because although the record never came out exactly as the arrangement had been written, they gave something for everybody to hang on to.”

  When Ahmet and Herb Abramson made their second visit to New Orleans in October 1949, Stone, who had become the first black person on the Atlantic payroll, accompanied them. Stone put up a sign in the back of a black record shop saying that anyone who had a song should bring it to Cosimo Matassa’s studio when the Atlantic Record Company would be there. Songwriters lined up outside the door, as Stone described, “like people going to a movie.” With a six-piece band in place, Stone auditioned each applicant, found out which key their song should be played in, and then worked out an arrangement. “In half an hour we cut the song. We got a lot of material that way.”

  When Stone returned from New Orleans, he began trying to write the kind of music he had heard there. “I listened to the stuff that was being done by those thrown-together bands in the joints down there, and I concluded that the only thing that was missin’ from the stuff we were recording was the rhythm. All we needed was a bass line. So I designed a bass pattern, and it sort of became identified with rock ’n’ roll . . . I’m the guilty person that started that. . . . When we started puttin’ that sound out on Atlantic, we started sellin’ like hotcakes.”

  Because Jerry Blaine was having a run of success with Sonny Til and the Orioles at Jubilee Records, Ahmet and Herb Abramson went looking for vocal groups with the kind of four-part harmony that was a forerunner of the doo-wop sound. After Waxie Maxie Silverman told Ahmet about four high school friends from Washington who called themselves the Clovers and were managed by Lou Krefetz, a record store owner in Baltimore, Ahmet signed them to the label. He then made it plain he did not want them to sound like their idols, the Ink Spots, or to record anything Billy Eckstine had already cut.

  Instead, he wrote “Don’t You Know I Love You” for them and assigned Jesse Stone to work with them as well as the Cardinals, a vocal group from Baltimore Herb Abramson had signed. Stone did his best to show both groups how to play music “based on the sound I had picked up in the south but they were northern boys and didn’t feel it.” In the studio, Ahmet got the kind of boogie sound on piano he had first heard Albert Ammons, Meade “Lux” Lewis, and Pete Johnson play and hired Frank “Floor Show” Culley to play a saxophone break. In Ahmet’s words, the way the Clovers sang “Don’t You Know I Love You” “was all wrong. I wrote it in a much blacker idiom than the way they sang it, which was more pop.” Nonetheless, the song went to number one on the R&B charts in 1951.

  By 1952 the team was in place at Atlantic Records. On the fifth floor at 234 West 56th Street at night, Tom Dowd would help push back the desks so he could get a clean, crisp sound as he recorded in a room where the walls had been covered with plywood. Jesse Stone was writing hit songs while also arranging other people’s compositions so they would become hits. Miriam Abramson was answering the phone, cutting the checks, watching the money, and hounding distributors so Atlantic could stay in business. Ahmet was signing talent, writing songs, and taking an increasing role in producing. By 1953, the label would also have the best session men in New York on call, among them Sam “The Man” Taylor, Budd Johnson, and Willis Jackson on sax, Connie Kay on drums, and Henry Van Walls on piano.

  The president of Atlantic Records was still Herb Abramson, who had guided the label through its early years by showing Ahmet the ropes in the studio and teaching him how to get records pressed and distributed. At Atlantic, Abramson was the steady and reliable figure on whom everyone could always depend. And then in the most unlikely way imaginable, the team was torn apart.

  SIX

  Shake, Rattle and Roll

  “With Jerry, things got better.”

  —Ahmet Ertegun

  1

  Although Herb Abramson was no longer a practicing dentist, the United States Army had paid for him to become one in return for a commitment to serve two years of active military duty. In February 1953, six years after he had completed his dental studies at New York University and just six months after his wife, Miriam, had given birth to a son, Abramson was ordered to report for service as a lieutenant in the Army Dental Corps in Germany. “When I left for the Army,” Abramson would later say, “Ahmet said to me, ‘I don’t know what we are going to do—after all, you used to supervise most of the sessions.’ I said, ‘Ahmet, you make three or four recording sessions entirely on your own, and even if each one bombs, by that time you will have learned enough to be confident in yourself.’ ”

  By then, Ahmet had already spent enough time in the studio to know what he was doing. His real problem was to find someone who could function as Abramson had done on a daily basis at Atlantic for the past six years. Out late every night, Ahmet regularly showed up for work long after everyone else. As he would later recall, “Everyone was worried when Herb Abramson went in the army because I was not really a person who would come in the office at eight o’clock in the morning and start calling up distributors to pay their bills. It wasn’t my thing.”

  While the departure of one of its founders could have well been the death knell for another independent record label, Ahmet managed to replace Abramson with a man who would help make Atlantic even more successful than either of its original partne
rs could ever have imagined. A year before Abramson was called up for duty, he and Ahmet had asked Jerry Wexler to join Atlantic as a promotion man who would also run their publishing company.

  A former staff writer at The Billboard, Wexler had demonstrated an unerring knack for favorably reviewing records that then became hits. After going to work for a music publisher, Wexler had further proven his music business acumen by bringing “Cry,” a huge hit for Johnnie Ray, and “Cold, Cold Heart,” a Hank Williams song that became a million-seller for Tony Bennett, to his friend Mitch Miller, the head of A&R at Columbia Records.

  By the time he sat down with Ahmet and Abramson at Atlantic in 1952, Wexler had already decided what he really wanted to do was make records. Wexler, who knew both partners well and “considered them among the most cultured cognoscenti in the city,” told them he would not feel comfortable working for friends. When Ahmet asked what would make him comfortable, Wexler boldly replied, “Being your partner.” Wexler would later write he was not at all surprised when Ahmet laughed and rejected his proposal.

  With Abramson about to begin his military service, Ahmet went to Paul Ackerman, the well-respected editor who had been Wexler’s “guru” at Billboard, for help in finding someone to join him at Atlantic. As Seymour Stein, the founder of Sire Records, who began working at Billboard when he was thirteen years old, later recalled, “Ackerman said, ‘There are a number of people I could recommend but there’s nobody better than Jerry Wexler.’ ”

  A brilliant self-educated intellectual who never lost the guttural working-class accent of his youth, Gerald Wexler was born in New York City on January 10, 1917. After emigrating from Poland to America, his father, Harry, became a window washer who worked twelve hours a day at a job he hated for $4 a week. His mother, the former Elsa Spitz, was a formidable and eccentric figure who played piano, sang light opera, and wanted her son to write the Great American Novel.

  Unlike his younger brother, Arthur, who joined the Communist Party and became “an ecstatic Marxist who followed Trotsky,” Wexler was “always a flaming progressive, just short of the red carrying card, which my mother was. She was a Communist. And so was my brother. I grew up with very left-wing socialist leanings but I balked at the point where I think all smart people did at being directed how to think and what kind of movies to watch and what kind of books were okay to read. I didn’t come close to toeing the party line. It was bullshit.”

  As a boy growing up in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, Wexler had spent most of his free time hanging out with the tough guys who frequented Artie Goodman’s pool hall on the corner of 181st Street and Bennett Avenue. Despite his mother’s insistence that he excel at his studies, Wexler had little use for school, often skipped classes, and soon acquired a reputation in his neighborhood as someone who never walked away from a fight.

  While attending George Washington High School, Wexler saw Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmie Lunceford, Roy Eldridge, and Red Allen perform at the Savoy Ballroom and the Apollo in Harlem. Like his future partner at Atlantic, he became a passionate collector of jazz records, most of which he bought in Salvation Army depots and junk shops.

  A recurrent college dropout, Wexler left City College after two semesters and then spent most of his only term at New York University in the pool hall. After his mother learned the tuition for out-of-state students was just $100 a term, she took him to enroll in the Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (now Kansas State University) in Manhattan, Kansas.

  Forsaking his studies, Wexler frequently made the hundred-mile journey to Kansas City to see Big Joe Turner, Bennie Moten, and Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy. As one of Wexler’s professors wrote his mother, “Gerald is a young man of marked ability who is manifestly unable to integrate his own personality into the world. He is teacher’s pet, yet teachers loathe him for his intolerable habit of trying—and too often succeeding—to steal their show.”

  After Wexler was asked to leave the school, his mother journeyed to Kansas to bring him home. On their way back to New York, she announced they would first be stopping off in Niagara Falls because, “I’ve never had a honeymoon. This might be my only chance.” Years later when someone asked her about the “oedipal implications” of her relationship with her son, she said, “Freud, shmeud. I loved Gerald, but I never wanted to fuck him.”

  Back in the city, Wexler joined his father in washing windows, a job he also thoroughly detested. He began hanging out at the Museum of Modern Art, where he watched foreign films and developed “an affinity for the Surrealists, particularly Magritte.” During a Sunday afternoon jam session on 52nd Street, then the center of the jazz world, he got high for the first time by smoking a joint rolled by Mezz Mezzrow, who had regularly come to Sunday lunch with Ahmet and his brother at the Turkish embassy in Washington.

  Drafted into the army after marrying Shirley Kampf in 1941, Wexler embraced the discipline and forced routine of military life and was assigned to the military police as a customs guard. Returning to Kansas after he was discharged, he completed his studies for a degree in journalism and then returned to New York City.

  In 1949, he was hired as a $75 a week cub reporter for Billboard where, in his words, “I was the only guy who knew how to use a semicolon.” When the magazine decided to change the name of its Race Records chart, Wexler threw out the term “rhythm and blues” and the name stuck. As he wrote later that year, “Rhythm and blues is a label more appropriate to more enlightened times.”

  A powerfully built man with dark hair and jug handle ears who had the rough-and-ready look of a dockworker, Wexler let his wife, Shirley, negotiate his deal at Atlantic with Ahmet and Herb and Miriam Abramson “because she had more confidence in me than I had in myself.” In return for $2,063.25, Wexler received a 13 percent share in Atlantic Records and a weekly salary plus expenses that gave him a weekly draw of $300. Neatly defining what would become the nature of their relationship, Ahmet took the money Wexler had invested and used it as a down payment on a green Cadillac convertible. He then gave the only vehicle in which a real record man could be seen to Wexler to replace his aging Dodge.

  On Wexler’s first day on the job, Miriam Abramson dumped the mail on his desk and he “fell into the role I would play for the next fifteen years—I ran the candy store. I got there early and I left late. I worried like crazy. I scrutinized bills, pored over details, supervised, and screamed when someone fucked up.” Constitutionally unable to delegate authority to anyone, he “operated with a divine disbelief in the competence of the staff. Consequently my modus operandi drove my employees nuts . . . My goals were short-range and limited: tactics always, strategy never.”

  A human dynamo born with the kind of energy that sometimes verged on the manic, Wexler always felt he had something to prove to those who had preceded him at Atlantic. While he would later credit Jesse Stone for having taught him everything he knew “about our craft,” Wexler was also keenly aware that Stone “always looked on me as an interloper with a slightly jaundiced eye. Because I came in to take Herb Abramson’s place. I came in after him. He had already been part of the fabric of the company. I was a replacement.”

  Like Ahmet, Wexler was also a walking encyclopedia of jazz and blues. While the two men shared an overwhelming passion for all forms of black roots music, they could not have been more different in the way they conducted their business. “If I was a plodder,” Wexler would later write, “Ahmet was an artist. He moved and managed by inspiration . . . He had phenomenal instincts, not simply as a talent scout but as a producer and songwriter as well . . . Fortunately, we complemented one another. Like a good rhythm section, we swung as a unit.”

  In every sense, their brand-new partnership was a marriage of opposites. While Ahmet was always cool, Wexler burned with a red hot flame. Born with a sense of entitlement second to none, Ahmet made it seem he had nothing to prove and wanted only to have a good time. A true child of the Depression, Wexler saw the rain cloud l
urking behind every brilliant ray of sunshine. Because his father had fallen short of making his own mark in the world, Wexler was driven by “ravening fear.” Ahmet was hip. Wexler was a hipster. And yet at Atlantic they soon became a perfectly matched pair, the record business equivalent of Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside.

  In large part this was due to Ahmet’s ability to harness Wexler’s immense talent. Having grown up in thrall to his older brother, Ahmet had further refined his skill at playing the supporting role in the double act during his years with Herb Abramson. In Jerry Wexler, who was determined to make the best of his first real shot at success in the record business by outworking all his competitors even if this also meant working himself and others to distraction, Ahmet had found the perfect partner. With Jerry Wexler firmly ensconced in the chair where Herb Abramson had once sat, the label was ready to rock.

  2

  When they went out on the road together for the first time to push Atlantic’s latest product by talking to disc jockeys, record retailers, and distributors in New Orleans and Chicago while looking for talent no one else had signed, Ahmet and Jerry Wexler discovered they had far more in common than their love for music and an overwhelming desire to make hits. As Wexler would later say, “We were very similar because we were both driven by a very heightened sense of irony. Irony prevailed. Discerning the ridiculous in the bourgeois around us and playing off that.”

  Seven years older than Ahmet and married, Herb Abramson had always been a steadying influence on his junior partner whenever they had set off on such trips together. Unlike Abramson, Jerry Wexler was up for everything and not about to judge the man for whom he was now working, thereby freeing Ahmet to indulge in outrageous behavior on the road.