The Last Sultan Read online

  With money in their pockets and an insatiable appetite for having as much fun as humanly possible, Ahmet and Wexler amused themselves by goofing on everyone they met. Feeding off one another like a pair of seasoned actors who had seen too many Bob Hope and Bing Crosby road movies, they regularly put on what Wexler called “little playlets” in which Ahmet assumed the role of the fast-talking sharpie while Wexler played along as the unwitting stooge who could never quite grasp that his partner was robbing him blind in every possible way.

  In a pawnbroker’s shop in New Orleans, a city where Wexler had never been before, Ahmet helped himself to a stack of twenty-dollar bills an inch at a time while generously telling his partner to do the same with a stack of singles, a routine inspired by a lengthy profile of the legendary playboy, gambler, and playwright Wilson Mizner in The New Yorker. Knowing they were smarter than anyone with whom they came into contact, Ahmet and Wexler believed they could get away with just about anything on the road.

  Wherever the two men went, Ahmet always knew everyone who mattered and where to go to hear great music while having more than one cocktail to make the night pass more quickly. Even then, Ahmet could drink most men under the table. Although no one could keep up with Ahmet, Wexler did his best to try.

  During their first visit to New Orleans, Wexler got so drunk one night at the legendary Dew Drop Inn that he could not make it back to the hotel and instead spent the night there with “two ‘Miss Fines’ to keep me warm.” When he stumbled downstairs in the morning, Wexler discovered Big Joe Turner eating breakfast in his undershirt with singers Smiley Lewis and Lloyd Price of “Stagger Lee” fame, who then went to the piano to accompany Turner as he sang. As Wexler would later say, “The road trips with Ahmet were like a total release. We were goofing on people and they had absolutely never seen white guys like us before. We used to have so much fun.”

  While on the road together, the two men also somehow managed to get their business done, recording Turner, Professor Longhair, Guitar Slim, and Champion Jack Dupree in New Orleans and then cutting a Joe Turner session with Elmore James on guitar at the Chess Records studio on the South Side of Chicago on October 7, 1953. When Leonard and Phil Chess showed up that night, four of the reigning kings of the independent record business sat down together to talk like friends.

  The sons of an itinerant Jewish shoemaker, Leonard and Phil Chess had been born in a Polish shtetl. Eleven years old when his family emigrated to America, Leonard had come up from the street in the roughest way imaginable. After working with his father as a junk dealer, he began running the Macomba Lounge in the tough Cottage Grove section of Chicago. To ensure no one would even think of trying to rob him when he left the bar with cash, Leonard bought himself a chrome-plated pearl-handled .44 revolver, which he strapped to his waist so it would be clearly visible. As he told his son Marshall, a gun in the pocket would “do you no good.”

  Having been around black people his entire life, Leonard used the language of the street in a manner that caused some who had only ever spoken to him on the phone to assume he was black. Phil Chess, who was rounder and softer-looking than his older brother, was in many ways also easier to deal with than Leonard. “He was like Nesuhi,” Marshall Chess would say of his uncle. “Ahmet could not have done it without Nesuhi just like my father could not have done it without Phil.”

  Although they were competitors, the Chess brothers and Ahmet and Wexler were also friends. Leonard regularly referred to them as “the New York Jews” and both men attended Marshall’s bar mitzvah. While the Chess brothers would sometimes help the partners at Atlantic by pressing copies of a big hit at one of their plants, the way in which they did business at their respective companies was completely different.

  Running their label like the company store many of their artists had frequented as children while growing up dirt poor in the rural South, the Chess brothers gave their performers money and cars when their records hit big on the charts. They bought them clothing, paid their rent and legal and medical bills, and then deducted what they had spent from the artists’ royalties. Concerning the generous advances the brothers lavished on their most successful performers, Wexler would later say although he and Ahmet also “poured them out . . . we didn’t make their car payments . . . we didn’t pay their mortgages . . . we didn’t dress them. We were not lords of the manor.”

  Wexler was also offended that the brothers sometimes referred to their artists as “chaya,” which in Yiddish means “animals.” “The Chess brothers,” Wexler said, “did have a plantation mentality. You better believe it. Phil Chess once asked me, ‘Do you pay royalties on a continuous basis?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘We just cut them out after a while.’ ”

  On the night they all sat down together in Chicago, Ahmet told Leonard Chess he had recently been listening to the radio as he drove through Atlanta but had not heard a single Chess record. Pulling over to the side of the road, Ahmet said he had called the deejay and said, “ ‘Listen, motherfucker, this is Chess Records. Have you got a wife and a family? You want ’em to live? Well you better start playin’ our records.’ That’s what I call promoting records. Now, what are you doing for Atlantic in Chicago?” Not realizing Ahmet was putting him on, Chess responded, “Come on, man, you didn’t! Now I got trouble in Atlanta.” As Wexler would later say, “Ahmet used to torture them with practical jokes.”

  Wexler, who had far more in common with the Chess brothers than Ahmet, told Leonard he was crazy to have gone into business with Benny Goodman’s brothers Gene and Harry to set up Arc Music, thereby giving away half of his publishing company to them. Wexler offered to have Atlantic handle the Chess copyrights through Atlantic’s Progressive Music for a 15 percent share of the profits only to have Leonard dismiss the idea by saying, “I can’t bother with that.”

  Throughout the course of their conversation that night, Ahmet continued to play the joker. When Leonard said he had made an agreement with Muddy Waters, whom Marshall Chess would later remember as having always been treated like a member of his family, to come over to the Chess house to do the gardening once his records stopped selling, Ahmet said he had cut a different deal with Big Joe Turner. “If his records don’t sell,” Ahmet said, “I can be his chauffeur.”

  While varying stories about Muddy Waters doing manual labor for the Chess brothers have been disputed, Ahmet would later say that when he visited Chess Records, Leonard, who “was a good friend of mine, took me around. The office was a storefront and there was a receptionist when you walked into the office who had a phone and a typewriter. There was a fellow sweeping up. Leonard Chess introduced me to this guy. His name was Muddy Waters. He hired him part-time to do the cleaning in the office. He was also one of the artists. I said to Leonard Chess, ‘Where is your accounting department?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Accounting department? Oh, our accountant is that girl at the entrance.’ I said, ‘She’s the receptionist and she’s also answering the phone and she’s also typing your letters and she’s also the accountant?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said. When I asked him about royalties, he said, ‘Royalties?’ And he smiled and we didn’t go further into that. We were not run that way. Other independent labels were selling records for cash and didn’t even deny it. They were proud of it.”

  “I liked Leonard and I liked Phil,” Wexler recalled. “Were we on a different level? We were college graduates. They came over and rode a junk wagon with their father collecting bottles and rags. That was how they started. More power to them. Anybody that had any knowledge of who we were would realize that we were cut from different cloth from Leonard Chess and Herman Lubinsky and the Mesner brothers at Aladdin Records. We were head and shoulders above that.”

  Unlike Ahmet and Wexler, Leonard and Phil Chess had gotten into the independent record business to make more money than they could have ever earned by running a bar. Although they had not grown up listening to black roots music, both men had a deep, instinctive feeling for the blues. The way in which they m
ade their records was also entirely different from how the partners at Atlantic approached the process. As Wexler would later note, Leonard Chess would see Muddy Waters in a bar, take him into the studio, and tell him to play what he had played the night before.

  In fact, Leonard Chess took a completely hands-on approach to making records. After Muddy Waters’ drummer could not get the beat right on a track, Leonard told him, “Get the fuck out of the way, I’ll do that,” and then sat down behind the drum kit to provide “a steady, serviceable thud.” Nor was he ever hesitant when it came to telling a performer how to sing. As Bo Diddley was about to cut his signature track, the eponymous “Bo Diddley,” Leonard ordered, “Motherfucker, sing like a man. The beat has got to move at all times.” Not surprisingly, Atlantic’s records never had the raw, gutbucket power that defined the Chess catalogue.

  Far more than the Chess brothers, Ahmet and Wexler already understood the power of the media. Over the years, both men would do countless interviews in which they made it plain how much of a contribution they had made to the growth of the independent record business in America while creating some of the greatest music of all time.

  Shortly before his death at the age of ninety-one in 2008, Wexler said, “It’s fashionable to present me as this street-wise kid stickball player from Washington Heights and Ahmet as the intellectual. That’s the big mistake. Because he came from the gilded palace and he was the son of the ambassador and I came from the street. Bullshit! I was a thousand times the intellectual that Ahmet was. I read a thousand times more books than he did. But that is not the public picture, is it? I was the street-wise kid. The street-wise kid was going home at night and reading Sherwood Anderson and listening to broadcasts of Fletcher Henderson.”

  On the night these four men sat down together in Chicago to talk, Wexler was still completely in thrall to the man who was showing him the inside workings of the business in which they would both spend the rest of their lives. Insofar as the two new partners at Atlantic were concerned, everything was still, as Wexler himself might have said, completely copacetic.

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  To stay in business, Atlantic had to sell sixty thousand singles a month and so Ahmet and Wexler often found themselves in the studio four nights a week. A hit record on the label would usually sell between 200,000 and 300,000 copies, but there were always far more misses than hits, and so the pressure to continue generating commercially successful material on a regular basis was unrelenting. As Wexler would later write, “We weren’t looking for canonization; we lusted for hits. Hits were the cash flow, the lifeblood, the heavenly ichor—the wherewithal of survival.”

  Within the short space of nine months in 1954, Ahmet and Jerry Wexler cut two songs that became big hits and also changed the face of popular music. On February 15 in the Atlantic office, the partners recorded their first smash with Big Joe Turner, “The Boss of the Blues.”

  Standing six foot two and weighing three hundred pounds, Joseph Vernon Turner Jr. was born on May 18, 1911, in Kansas City, Missouri. Leaving school at the age of fourteen, he began working as a cook and then a singing bartender in the clubs and bars on 12th Street in what was then a wide-open city run by “Boss” Tom Pendergast. In 1936, Turner performed in New York City for the first time on a bill with Benny Goodman and then appeared at the first of John Hammond’s legendary “From Spirituals to Swing” concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938.

  After performing on the first show Nesuhi and Ahmet put on in Washington, in 1945, Turner signed with National Records, where he was produced by Herb Abramson. A huge physical presence with a wide, soft face, sleepy eyes, and a neatly trimmed mustache, Turner was a blues shouter who could perform in a variety of genres, jazz, big band, jump blues, rhythm and blues, and what was about to become known as rock ’n’ roll.

  Ahmet signed Big Joe Turner to the label in March 1951 after seeing him perform at the Apollo with the Count Basie band. Hurried in without a rehearsal as a last-minute replacement for the band’s ailing regular singer, Jimmy Rushing, Turner’s first performance turned out to be a disaster. As Ahmet later described the evening, “The Basie Band had intricate arrangements that were not exactly 12-bar blues. In between the blues, there would be maybe 18, 20, 24-bars. Joe couldn’t read music . . . So he was singing with the band, but he would come back in in the wrong place; and the band would clash with what he was doing. Then the band finished and he was still singing!”

  The audience at the Apollo was known even then for being “the toughest and very critical—so at the end of this tragic moment for Joe, they started hooting, howling, jeering, and laughed him off the stage.” Rushing backstage to console Turner, Ahmet was told the singer had already left. Finding him in the bar of the Braddock Hotel next door, Ahmet told Turner he “shouldn’t be a sideman with an orchestra anyway; you’re a star in your own right—we want to make you a big star. Come and make records with us.”

  A seasoned veteran who knew how the record business worked, Turner replied, “Okay, if you pay me money.” When Ahmet said he could come up with $500, Turner said, “Yeah, that’s good.” Quickly, Ahmet then added, “For four sides.” Turner, who always called Ahmet “cuz,” said, “All right, cuz. I’ll go with you and see what happens.” With Ahmet whispering the lyrics of a song he had written for him in his ear, Turner cut “Chains of Love” and then “Honey Hush” for Atlantic, both of which became R&B hits.

  Jesse Stone would later say Herb Abramson had come to him before Turner’s session at Atlantic on February 15, 1954, to say he wanted to find an up-tempo blues number for Turner to sing for a change. As Abramson was then in the army, it must have been Ahmet who made the request. In Stone’s words, “I threw a bunch of phonetic phrases together—‘shake, rattle, and roll,’ ‘flip, flop, and fly’—and I came up with thirty or forty verses. Then I picked over them.”

  Writing under the name Charles Calhoun, Stone came up with five verses and a chorus for “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” While the title describes someone about to roll a pair of dice from a cup, it was also widely understood to be a euphemism for sexual intercourse. The song itself became what writer Nick Tosches would later call “the perfect record” with lascivious lyrics that were not quite dirty enough to keep it from being played on the radio. Perfectly paced to the rocking beat, the chorus was so simple and infectious even a child could sing it.

  With Stone on piano, Mickey “Guitar” Baker—later of Mickey and Sylvia fame—on guitar, Connie Kay on drums, Wilbur DeParis on trombone, and Sam “The Man” Taylor blowing a killer solo on tenor sax, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” was, as rock critic Greil Marcus would later write, “a story of domestic lust, lustful impatience, sexual wonder, and sex—grinding—that at once goes far beyond the salaciousness of the R&B hits of the time and is somehow as clean, healthy (and perhaps as dutiful) as hard work.” As Marcus also noted, it was the chorus that sold the song. If in “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” Big Joe Turner was “a great actor more than a great singer,” then Stone, Ahmet, and Wexler, who were wearing white shirts and black ties and clapping their hands as they shouted “their heads off behind him” gave it “a flashy, white, drunken frat-boy edge.”

  Turner had cut twenty sides for Atlantic before making “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” but nothing he had ever done for the label compared to this record. Going to number one on the R&B charts after it was released in April, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” stayed there for eleven weeks. The song was then covered with sanitized lyrics by Bill Haley and the Comets on Decca. Released in July 1954, that version became the first rock ’n’ roll song to sell a million copies.

  While the cover did not have the filthy groove and low-down funk of the original, it did open the ears of white teenagers across America to a sound they had never heard before. While the question of what was actually the first rock ’n’ roll song remains a source of debate among music historians and critics, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” ranks high on any list. Using the original lyrics, Elvis Presley also cut his own v
ersion of the song as a demo for Sam Phillips at Sun Records in 1955 and the song then became a hit for him as well. In time, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” would help launch Atlantic’s rise to the forefront of the independent record business. As Greil Marcus wrote, the record “still sounds like a door being flung open. But it doesn’t quite sound as if people have made it to the other side.”

  Six months later under completely different circumstances, Ahmet and Wexler recorded another song that helped break down the barriers between black music and the white audience that was still learning to appreciate it. Before Ray Charles cut what would become his breakthrough hit on Atlantic, he had already recorded thirty-eight sides for the label without finding the distinctive sound on which he would base his career. As Paul Wexler, himself a record producer, would say of Ahmet and his father, “These guys were so attuned to black popular music at that point that they could hear the talent in its rawest form before even the talent knew what it wanted to do.”

  Ray Charles had written what would become his first great song while lying in the backseat of a car rolling through Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana as he was touring with his band. Smoking cigarettes and marijuana, Charles heard a gospel song entitled “Jesus Is All the World to Me” on the radio and began singing along to it with trumpet player Renald Richard, who then wrote down the lyrics and added a bridge from another song.

  Calling Ahmet and Wexler in New York, Charles asked if they would come to Atlanta, where he would be performing at the Royal Peacock Club at 186 Auburn Avenue in the black section of the city. Flying to Atlanta, the partners took a cab to the “very inexpensive motel that went with the club.” Saying, “I’ve got something you boys need to hear,” Charles suddenly took off down the stairs. Because the singer had already plotted out his route to the club, the partners had to struggle to keep up with him.