The Last Sultan Read online

  In an empty club in the middle of the afternoon, Charles’s seven-piece band was already onstage. As soon as Charles heard Ahmet and Wexler walk in behind him, he counted off “I Got a Woman” and the band tore into it. Ahmet and a “stunned” Wexler were deluged by what Wexler would call “an amazing succession of songs.” Both partners knew they needed to find a studio to record the material they had just heard.

  Through Xenas Sears, a local R&B disc jockey, the partners booked studio time on November 18, 1954, at WGST, the Georgia Tech University radio station. Throughout the session, they had to stop recording every hour on the hour so the staff announcer could read the news. Making the situation more difficult, the station’s elderly engineer kept missing Ahmet’s frantic cues to adjust the microphones for solos and ensemble passages.

  When Charles had recorded “Mess Around” in New York City nine months earlier, Wexler, who was then still coming onboard at Atlantic, had listened quietly without offering any input. During this session, Wexler’s “anxious stream of suggestions” irritated Charles. Despite the chaotic nature of the session, the partners cut four songs. While listening to playbacks of “I Got a Woman,” both Ahmet and Wexler felt certain they “had found Ray’s breakthrough smash at last.”

  Released in December 1954, the record became Ray Charles’s first number one R&B hit. As Charles’s biographer Michael Lydon wrote, “The record blended elements like a hybrid flower. It had a dancing beat like a jump blues, but it was based on gospel’s ‘rise to glory’ chords, and the cheerful lyric, infectiously delivered by Ray, gave that mix a pop music gloss.” Charles repeated the phrase “I got a woman, way over town” so often during the song that the partners hoped it would become “a sing-along line people would plug nickels into jukeboxes to hear over and over again.”

  For the first time in the history of popular music, an artist had blended the blues and gospel into a single song. By doing so, Ray Charles had taken a giant step in creating the new musical genre that would come to be known as “soul.” Concerning their session in Atlanta, Ahmet would later say, “It was a real lesson for me to see an artist of his stature at work.”

  By now, Ahmet had formed a close personal relationship with Charles. A “quick mimic” who “played a mean game of checkers,” Charles’s incredible self-confidence allowed him to maneuver with consummate skill through a world he could not see. “Totally focused” on his own music, Charles always knew exactly what was going on around him and unlike many other musicians “followed the news on the radio and could talk about what was going on in the world.” In a manner Ahmet could never have anticipated, Ray Charles would eventually teach him more about the record business than any other artist.

  In the short space of six months, Atlantic had released two songs that would define the future of the record business in America. “Shake, Rattle and Roll” helped begin rock ’n’ roll. “I Got a Woman” established soul. What the two songs had in common were Ahmet and Wexler. While even they knew there was always an element of luck involved in everything they did, the partners at Atlantic were now well on their way to becoming the greatest team in the history of the record business.

  SEVEN

  Brothers in Arms

  “Ahmet looked upon Herb Abramson as a brother and the deterioration of that relationship was painful for all of us.”

  —Jerry Wexler

  1

  On April 25, 1955, News from Atlantic, the label’s weekly press handout, happily announced the long awaited return of the company’s president and cofounder. Beneath a headline reading, “Herb’s Back: Prexy Herb Abramson Returns to Atlantic After GI Stint,” the release noted that after having spent two years overseas “as a dentist in the [sic] Air Force,” during which time he had attained the rank of captain, “Herb Abramson . . . returns to active service in N.Y.C. this week” and “will jump into the a.&r. picture immediately to speed execution of the expansion and improvement plans long contemplated by the organization.”

  Since Abramson had left the label, the release noted that Jerry Wexler had joined Atlantic as a vice president and “teamed with v.p.’s Ertegun and Miriam Abramson to continue the company’s success along the original lines.” Atlantic had actively gone into music publishing with Progressive Music, launched a new subsidiary label named Cat, and had most recently added Nesuhi Ertegun to the company “as a v.p. in charge of a new jazz and Album program.”

  As “Herb earned his reputation as an ‘idea man,’ ” and Atlantic was “no longer a specialty label” but was now approaching “major status in the general record business . . . Herb’s return signals the beginning of a great new era of expansion with full executive force.” Planning to “open new vistas for Atlantic along electronic lines,” especially in the field of binaural (stereo) recording, Abramson would be devoting “much effort to hi-fi techniques, quality control and general product improvement, with an eye also to the developing tape market.”

  Noting Abramson had just been granted a patent “for his invention of the trick-track children’s records, two of which Atlantic issued several years ago” that allowed a phonograph needle to randomly select various tracks so 256 different stories could be told on four 78 RPM sides, the handout concluded by stating, “You can expect plenty of surprises with this Abramson cat around!” In ways no press release could have ever adequately explained, no truer words had ever been written.

  Herb Abramson was in fact returning to a company that bore little resemblance to the struggling independent label he had left two years earlier. While he had been gone, Big Joe Turner had hit it big with “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” The Drifters had scored a number one R&B record with “Honey Love,” a song written by Clyde McPhatter and Wexler. Ray Charles had gone to the top of the R&B chart with “I Got a Woman.” The Clovers had cut four Top Ten R&B hits, among them “Lovey Dovey,” which Ahmet had written.

  In an essay in Cashbox magazine in 1954 credited to Ahmet and Wexler but most likely written by Wexler, the partners had explained how the blues would have to change to meet the tastes of the label’s new target audience, “the bobby soxers,” who in great numbers were now looking to find their own sound. Having coined the phrase “rhythm and blues,” Wexler borrowed a term being used to describe music popular in the South and the Southwest and decided to call this new form “cat music.” As he explained in the essay, cat music would be “Up-to-date blues with a beat, and infectious catch phrases, and danceable rhythms . . . It has to kick and it has to have a message for the sharp youngsters who dig it.”

  While the term never caught on, Wexler did establish a short-lived subsidiary label at Atlantic called Cat on which the Chords recorded “Sh-Boom.” The song went to number two on the Billboard R&B chart and then became the first doo-wop record to enter the Top Ten on the pop chart, rising to number five. Covered by the Crew Cuts on Mercury for a white audience, the song was the number one record for nine weeks in August and September of 1954. In no small part, this was because Tom Dowd was then still regularly being hired by major labels to produce white cover versions of Atlantic’s R&B hits that sounded as much like the original as possible.

  Even after Herb Abramson rejoined Atlantic, Ahmet and Wexler continued going out on the road together. Journeying to Memphis to hang out with legendary disc jockey Dewey Phillips while he was on the air at WHBQ, they then accompanied him to the Variety Club, where Elvis Presley happened to be having a beer. The partners had already tried to buy Presley’s contract from Sam Phillips at Sun Records for the astronomical sum of $30,000 only to have Phillips accept RCA’s offer of $40,000 with a $5,000 bonus thrown in to sweeten the deal. If in fact Elvis had accepted their offer, the partners would have been hard pressed to come up with the money.

  While Herb Abramson had in fact been very much like a brother to Ahmet before leaving Atlantic, Ahmet’s brother was now at the label as well. Unable to bear the thought of Nesuhi going to work for Lew Chudd at Imperial Records in Los Angeles, Ahmet had told him
, “You can’t do that. We’ll make you a partner in Atlantic.” As Abramson would later say, “So, foolish me, I said to Ahmet, ‘Give Nesuhi some of your stock, that doesn’t cost me anything.’ Then boom, what do I know, there is another hostile partner. Ahmet and Nesuhi used to talk in Turkish in my presence to say things I wasn’t supposed to know.” As Wexler would describe it, Ahmet and Nesuhi’s relationship was based on “exasperation and exacerbation.” There were times when he was closer to them than they were to each other “except when it came to the bone, the Turkish nitty-gritty.”

  Moving to New York, where he would soon marry for the second time, Nesuhi took over production of Atlantic’s jazz records while also overseeing the label’s entry into the burgeoning market for albums recorded in the long-playing 331/3 format. With an eye for design and packaging second to none, Nesuhi personally approved all the artwork that appeared on the label’s album covers while also signing and/or producing the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Keith Jarrett.

  As the noted jazz critic Nat Hentoff would later write, “Nesuhi was the most respected figure in jazz recording among musicians and, indeed, among his competitors. He had—to begin with—unerring taste. With that taste went standards. His love for the music prevented him from lowering his standards. And he had genuine respect for the musicians he signed for the label.”

  Unlike Ahmet, who often took control of a recording session in order to come up with a hit, Nesuhi was always a far more supportive presence in the studio. In the words of John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Nesuhi “let us decide what we wanted to play.” Both Mingus and Coltrane trusted him implicitly because “they knew Nesuhi knew how to listen.” Hentoff added, “There was also his abiding curiosity. He was not afraid of being surprised, or even startled, by sounds he had never heard before . . . he became, in essence, one of the musicians. A description he would prize.”

  Although Atlantic’s jazz records never sold nearly as much as the hits produced by Ahmet and Wexler, both men recognized the need to keep this form of music alive by giving Nesuhi free rein to sign artists he believed were doing significant work. By making it plain he did not share their feelings about this situation, Herb Abramson further complicated his already difficult reentry at the label. Until he joined Atlantic, Nesuhi had made only what Abramson called “moldy fig” records. “That was a very fine little hobby,” Abramson would later say, “but he wasn’t in the mainstream of the record business.”

  Now that both Nesuhi and Wexler were at Atlantic, Abramson no longer had the direct connection to Ahmet that had bound the two men together when they were struggling to get the company off the ground. Nor was Ahmet the same person he had been when Abramson had last worked with him on a daily basis. For the past two years, Ahmet had been in charge at Atlantic and was now far more assured and self-confident than he had been when the partners had worked side by side.

  As Miriam Abramson would later say, “When Herb came back from the army in 1955, we were doing pretty well—everybody had cars . . . This whole shift in balance was something he couldn’t adjust to. He couldn’t come back as number one, and he certainly couldn’t come back as number three. He had an ego, because he had started the company and he had experience. So it was rather an awkward situation. I think neither Jerry nor Ahmet felt comfortable working with him. They’d had it with Herb from the minute he came back from Germany. He drove them crazy and he was driven mad by the fact that his place had been usurped.”

  In the record business, especially at a label like Atlantic that was now growing by leaps and bounds as the new white teenage market kept expanding, two years was an eternity. Despite all the changes that had occurred at the company while Abramson had been away, he could have still found a way to fit in if the same man who had gone off to serve his country had returned. But by all accounts, Herb Abramson in the spring of 1955 did not resemble the person he had once been. In Wexler’s words, “Herb came back a little bit nutso.” The songwriter Doc Pomus, who had worked with Abramson during Atlantic’s first days at the Hotel Jefferson, called him “an absolutely professional flake” whose behavior grew more erratic by the day. “He fancied himself as a songwriter, and always called me up in the middle of the night to help him write a song. He grew weirder as time went on. Even so, he really was a lovely guy.”

  While it was obvious to those who knew Abramson that his personality had undergone a radical transformation during his time in Germany, they could only speculate as to the cause. As his wife Miriam, who had spent three months with her husband while he was stationed overseas and did not find him to be depressed, would later say, “Herb lost the impetus. He was gone and he lost it. His mind was altered. He did a lot of pot.” In the words of Delia Gottlieb, who had first met Abramson more than a decade earlier in Washington, “I think Herb very definitely got into drugs in Germany and came back changed because he had been isolated from what he knew.”

  Although Abramson’s third wife, Barbara, said she “never knew Herb to do cocaine,” dentists did then have the legal right to possess and prescribe the substance as a topical anesthetic. “Herb was snorting cocaine,” someone who knew Abramson well during this period would later confirm. “He was a dentist and would write his own prescriptions. He had a guy working for him who would run and get the drugs for him in the studio. It was all cocaine behavior. He must have gotten hooked in Germany.”

  Whether it was the loneliness and isolation Abramson felt while spending two years overseas as a military dentist when he really wanted to be making records that caused him to begin using the drug, no one can say for sure. Twenty years before cocaine would become the drug of choice for artists as well as many of the top-ranking executives in the record business, Herb Abramson had come back from Germany with a habit that would have made it difficult for anyone to work with him under any circumstances. Nor did he come home alone.

  Herb Abramson brought with him from Germany a woman he wanted to marry. As Wexler would later say, “He came back with a Brunhilde!” Although Abramson had a two-year-old son he barely knew, he went with his German girlfriend to Reno to establish residency for a Nevada divorce, and it was there she became pregnant with his child. The two soon married but, in Miriam Abramson’s words, “She was very unhappy in the United States. She hated it. And she went to group therapy and ran away with somebody else. From group therapy.”

  While her husband had been in the army, Miriam had continued to receive his full salary as the president of the label. Now that their marriage was over, new financial arrangements had to be made so they could both continue working at Atlantic. “To this point,” she said, “I’d never had my own salary. I just had his. When we got the divorce, I got no alimony. Herb said if he gave me stock instead of alimony, I would say it was okay for Nesuhi to come in. So Nesuhi and I got stock at about the same time.”

  With his former wife running day-to-day operations at the label, and Ahmet, Wexler, and Nesuhi doing business together in one office, Abramson set up shop in another office with a conference room between them. What must have been a fairly intolerable situation for all concerned lasted a few tense months until Ahmet and Wexler decided Abramson should have his own subsidiary label at Atlantic, to be known as Atco (shorthand for the Atlantic Corporation), thereby giving him the chance, as Charlie Gillett would later write, “to prove that he had not lost his touch, that Ahmet was mistaken if he thought Jerry Wexler was any kind of substitute as a producer.”

  The partners also set up Atco because, as Wexler explained, “It behooved us to create another label, another logo, that could be handled by distributors other than the ones we had to give us more outlets for our product. It was a way to diversify.” While Herb Abramson was now back at the label, the writing on the wall was plain for everyone to see. It was just a matter of time until he would be gone for good.

  2

  By 1957, a year in which the partners at Atlantic
were forced to reduce their weekly salaries despite releasing hits by the Coasters, Chuck Willis, Clyde McPhatter, and the Bobbettes, Ahmet had shifted into full playboy mode and could be found out on the town night after night enjoying life to the fullest. Not yet the A-list celebrity he would eventually become, his divorce from Jan Holm was noted only in the somewhat lowly New York Journal-American by gossip columnist Louis Sobol, who on November 20, 1957, wrote, “The Ahmet Ertigons [sic] (he heads a record firm) have parted. His pop was once Turkish Ambassador to the US.”

  Still somewhat insecure about his own appearance, Ahmet had experienced a personal breakthrough in his dating life after being told that even the most beautiful models in New York were like teenage girls who liked to go out at night so they could be seen in the most fashionable places. Armed with this bit of invaluable information, he began keeping company with a succession of well-known models on a regular basis. The very sleek, racy-looking 1955 Aston Martin DB2/4 coupe Ahmet was now driving around Manhattan also did nothing to hurt his cause.

  While Ahmet’s former wife had been a model, she had never attained the lofty status of Pat Jones, who, in Miriam Abramson’s words, was “the muse for James Galanos, the famous California designer. They used to have dancing in the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel and when she and Ahmet would come in together, the band would play ‘Have You Met Miss Jones?’ ” After Pat Jones introduced Ahmet to her friend Betsy Pickering, a former Sarah Lawrence student whom Time magazine described as one of “the cool all-American beauties . . . of the 50’s,” Ahmet began dating her as well.