The Last Sultan Page 16

  As Herb Abramson got older, his kidneys began to fail. Insisting this “was not for publication,” Ahmet would tell an interviewer that after Abramson had “lost all his money, I put him on a salary that nobody knew about. I guess I had him for the last twenty years of his life.” One week before his eighty-third birthday on November 9, 1999, Herb Abramson died of kidney failure. Through Atlantic Records, Ahmet paid for his cremation.

  In time, Abramson’s decision to sell his interest in Atlantic before the company began generating huge profits came to be viewed in the record business as a mistake of historic proportions. Abramson himself seems to have dealt with it with a kind of equanimity shared by few others in an industry he had helped create. As he would later say, “I sometimes look at it like a poker game, in that originally there are quite a few participants, but some of them are dealt out, and some of them end up with all the chips. That is the way the cookie crumbles.”

  In a letter of condolence he sent to Barbara Abramson shortly after her husband’s death, Jerry Wexler wrote, “Herb was a wonderful man. Not only for his talent and role as a pioneer in recorded music but for the fine character and inherent decency that was so basic to his nature. Life had not always been kind to him and although we rarely communicated through the years, I sensed that he never let misfortune embitter him or turn him against others.”

  Wexler concluded his letter by writing, “He welcomed me into the firm and as he said goodbye to us for his tour of Army duty, he left me with this counsel. ‘No matter what, don’t ever stop making records.’ Simplistic on the face of it but it turned out to be the most important single rule to go by through all the vicissitudes of a very tough occupation.”

  At Atlantic Records, Ahmet, Wexler, and Nesuhi were now in control. Within a matter of weeks after Herb Abramson had walked out of their offices for the final time, Ahmet came up with the huge hit that finally crossed the label over into the white teenage market it had been pursuing for so long.

  EIGHT

  Splish Splash

  “Splish splash/I was takin’ a bath/Long about a Saturday night.”

  —Bobby Darin, Murray Kaufman, and Jean Murray

  1

  As he sat in the bleachers surrounded by teenagers in a television studio at WFIL in Philadelphia with a microphone in his hand, a very youthful-looking and impossibly handsome Dick Clark leaned into the camera to introduce an artist he was proud to say was also a personal friend. After telling Clark he had no idea what was happening across the country because everywhere he went throughout the land, people were saying the best show on television was Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, Bobby Darin said he was about to introduce a new song he thought could be pretty big.

  Moving off to where performers like Frankie Avalon, Connie Francis, and Dion and the Belmonts lip-synched their latest releases on the show teenagers all over America rushed home from school each day to watch, Darin began snapping his fingers and rolling his shoulders to the infectious beat of “Splish Splash.” Due in no small part to the exposure Dick Clark gave the song on Bandstand as well as his wildly popular Saturday night show on ABC, the record became a million-seller and rose to the top of the R&B charts.

  With the possible exception of Jerry Blavat, who in time would become a fast-talking radio disc jockey known as “The Geater with the Heater” and “The Big Boss with the Hot Sauce,” none of the teenagers who danced regularly on Bandstand and so had themselves become pop stars, had ever heard of Ahmet Ertegun. Nor would they have understood how a man twice their age could have known that a song with nursery rhyme lyrics and a rocking beat would allow Atlantic Records to finally tap into the brand-new market American Bandstand as well as a slew of locally televised teenage dance shows had created.

  With Alan Freed’s own nationally televised Big Beat show having been canceled when ABC affiliates in the South became outraged by the sight of singer Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl as the show’s closing credits rolled, Dick Clark had become the man who could make or break a record in America. In small towns all over the country, teenagers would vanish from the streets as soon as American Bandstand came on at three, not to be seen again until the program ended at four-thirty.

  While AM radio remained the mainstay for teenagers who listened to rock ’n’ roll, they could now for the first time sit in their parents’ living rooms and actually watch performers whom they had only ever heard before. The new medium was ideally suited for an artist like Bobby Darin, who with his good looks and brash, self-assured stage presence could sell a song like no one but Elvis.

  Although Herb Abramson had recognized Darin’s talent by signing him to Atco, he had never known what to do with him in the studio and actually delayed a session at which Darin wanted to record “Splish Splash” until the artist came up with “better material.” Darin had written the song in disc jockey Murray “The K” Kaufman’s New York apartment while they were “shooting the shit one night” and “talking about writing songs.” Opening his “big mouth,” Darin boasted he could write a song “off any idea: give me an idea and you got a song. So Murray says, ‘Okay, wise guy. Write me a song that has “splish splash I was takin’ a bath” as one of the lines.’ I went right to his piano and did it.” In truth, Kaufman’s mother, Jean Murray, had suggested the line to him over the phone and she then collaborated with Darin and Kaufman on the music.

  Had it not been for the ongoing tension between the partners at Atlantic, Darin might never have recorded what became his breakthrough hit. In Ahmet’s words, “Bobby Darin used to come see Herb, and Herb would keep him waiting, sometimes an hour before he could see him. He didn’t care. The records weren’t selling . . . Herb was keeping him waiting and he would be in the waiting room next to my office where there was a piano and he would sit and play . . . I thought, ‘My God, this kid is terrific.’ ”

  When Ahmet learned Darin’s one-year contract with Atco was about to expire and Abramson intended to release him, he decided to produce the artist on his own. Although by now Ahmet was no longer doing much actual recording, he took Darin into the Atlantic office at 234 West 56th on April 10, 1958, for a split session with jazz singer Morgana King, whom he had just signed to Atlantic. “Can you imagine?” Jerry Wexler recalled, “the disparity between a Morgana King and a Bobby Darin? In a single session?”

  Realizing Darin had been “creating a completely different kind of music,” Ahmet decided “he needed a much funkier backing than he had been getting” and put together “a little rhythm section” of good R&B players Darin knew and liked. Together, they selected the sides Darin would cut in his hour and a half of studio time. Ahmet also insisted Darin play piano on the session “because that was one of the things that got me about him—the basic rhythm that he put into his songs.”

  With Tom Dowd at the board of the brand-new eight-track Ampex 300 recording console he had persuaded the partners at Atlantic to let him buy for $11,000 and Ahmet instructing drummer Panama Francis to lay back on the “eights” he was playing on his cymbals, Darin did seven takes of the song before they had it down. “When I cut the record,” Ahmet would later say, “I thought it was going to the top. It was a cute novelty lyric, and everybody dug it. Without the lyric, it would have been a hit because of the music and the track. It was just there.”

  Confirming that Ahmet was already light-years ahead of his partners when it came to understanding the kind of records kids who watched American Bandstand would buy, Wexler said, “I thought ‘Splish Splash’ was an abominable piece of shit, but Ahmet saw it and that was why he did it and that was the beginning of Bobby Darin.”

  During the same session, Darin cut “Queen of the Hop,” which also became a Top Ten hit. Earlier in the day, Ahmet had learned that Chuck Willis, who in 1957 had cut “C.C. Rider” for Atlantic, thereby inspiring the Stroll dance craze, had died on an operating table in Atlanta, Georgia, at the age of thirty. “It was our first experience of a great artist being taken away from us, suddenly out of
the blue,” Ahmet would later say. “It was a terrible tragedy and a devastating shock to all of us.” Despite the bad news, Ahmet managed to produce two hits for Darin in that day.

  In the mistaken belief he was still going to be cut loose from his Atco contract, Darin went into Decca’s New York studio two weeks later and cut “Early in the Morning,” a song that bore a great resemblance to Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman.” When Decca learned Darin had re-signed with Atco, the company credited the song to “The Ding Dongs” and released it on its Brunswick label eight days after “Splish Splash” hit the stores.

  “Bobby Darin snuck off with Murray the K and they went out and cut a record and then gave it to Decca under another name,” Paul Marshall, who was then handling Atlantic’s legal affairs, recalled. “Darin was called in with his lawyer and his manager and we had this meeting with Ahmet and Jerry. I pointed out he was a young man with a great start to a career and the last thing he needed was people like me on his case to stop this record and what would he get from it? Murray the K would have made some money but not him. I said, ‘You just made a terrible mistake. Because I’m going to beat you.’ ”

  After Darin had signed a statement retracting Decca’s right to release the record, Marshall called Murray the K, who “took a very harsh line and had a chip on his shoulder.” Walking over to the phone on Ahmet’s desk, Marshall picked it up and said, “Get me the manager for WINS.” Suddenly nervous, Murray the K demanded to know why Marshall was calling his radio station. “Murray,” Marshall told him, “if we’re going to sue somebody who plays our records, it’s wise for us to warn them that we’re going to do it.”

  Faced with a lawsuit Decca knew it could not win, the label surrendered the masters to Atco but then rushed Buddy Holly into the studio to record his own version of the song, which they then released before Atco could issue the original verson credited to Bobby Darin and the Rinky Dinks. Both versions became minor hits, with the original rising slightly higher on the charts than the cover. “I wish somebody could catch the glamour and glory of the fifties,” Marshall would later say. “Those days were so much fun. The majors lost control. Rock ’n’ roll came and they didn’t believe in it and all these guys came out of the woods and a lot of them were characters. There were no MBAs. Just people who loved records.”

  Six months after “Splish Splash” had made Bobby Darin a star, Ahmet was having lunch with his friend the well-known Austrian singer and actress Lotte Lenya who as Jenny Diver in the 1928 stage version of her husband, Kurt Weill’s, The Threepenny Opera had introduced the song “Mack the Knife,” with lyrics written by Bertolt Brecht. At some point, she asked Ahmet why he had never made a recording of any of her husband’s songs. Ahmet told her he didn’t make that kind of record at his company but when she asked him to promise he would try, Ahmet said, “Well, maybe we will.”

  A few days later, Darin came to see Ahmet with the version of “Mack the Knife” Louis Armstrong had cut in 1956. “I know this sounds pretty weird,” Darin said, “but I think I could make a great version of this—I should do it.” Then twenty-three years old, Darin loved big band arrangements and songs that were standards. After seeing The Threepenny Opera in Greenwich Village, Darin had begun performing “Mack the Knife” on tour.

  When Darin told Ahmet he wanted to cut the song so he could be more than “a teen idol,” Ahmet’s initial response was, “What are you talking about? You’ll ruin your career.” Nor was he alone in this opinion. Dick Clark told Darin he was crazy to want to record “Mack the Knife” and “he was going to die with the song.” Still owed royalties for “Splish Splash,” Darin told Ahmet he was willing to roll the money over and pay for the session at his own expense. Backed by a full orchestra conducted by Richard Weiss and with Ahmet, Nesuhi, and Wexler producing, Darin cut the song in December 1958.

  “As we were cutting ‘Mack the Knife,’ ” Ahmet recalled, “everybody knew that this was going to be a number one record. Then I realized that having done the rock thing, Bobby was now going to have a big pop hit. He was going to be a major, major star . . . But we knew as we were cutting it. We were jumping up and down. After the first take, I said, ‘You’ve got it. That’s it.’ ”

  Despite Ahmet’s enthusiastic reaction during the session, it was not until “Dream Lover,” a record Ahmet and Wexler also produced, had gone to number two in the pop charts and Darin’s manager had urged Ahmet to put out “Mack the Knife” as a single that the song was finally released in August 1959. Darin’s jumping, swinging version of the song, in which he improvised Lotte Lenya’s name into two different verses, went to number one three months later and stayed there for nine weeks. The only number one hit Darin would have in his career, the record remained in the Top Ten for a year and sold two million copies. “Mack the Knife” won the 1959 Grammy Award for Best Record of the Year and Darin was named Best New Artist.

  When “Beyond the Sea,” Darin’s version of Charles Trenet’s “La Mer,” became a hit as well, the singer could do no wrong and began appearing at the Copacabana nightclub in New York, where he set the all-time attendance record. In time, Darin would record twenty hits for Atco, the label from which he had nearly been released by Herb Abramson.

  For the partners at Atlantic, the good news was that the dry spell in which they had been mired throughout 1957 was over. “Two records got us back in the game,” Wexler would later write. “These tunes were so winning, so widely popular, so immediately irresistible, no one could keep them off the air.” One of those songs was “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters. The other was “Splish Splash.” “Each sold well over a million. At wholesale, that meant $400,000 or $500,000 in revenue.”

  Despite a decade of success at Atlantic, two records with a combined running time of about four minutes had made it possible for the partners to cover their operating costs while also providing them with their yearly income. In an era when the independent record business was still a crap shoot of major proportions and the pressure to come up with hits was unrelenting, Ahmet had proven yet again he had a set of magic ears.

  2

  Atlantic chose to celebrate its tenth year in the record business by filling the January 13, 1958, edition of Billboard with nineteen pages of articles and congratulatory ads that purported to tell the real story of how the company had grown “during one of the industry’s liveliest ten year periods” and so was now poised to become a major label. Both Ahmet and Nesuhi contributed signed pieces in which they discussed Atlantic’s humble beginnings as well as its very bright future in the jazz LP field.

  In alphabetical order beneath their photographs, Atlantic’s brightest stars were profiled while being featured in quarter-page ads bearing their likeness, for which they had most likely paid. Now married to Freddy Bienstock, an Austrian-born executive at Hill & Range, the music publishing company whose number one client was Elvis Presley, the former Miriam Abramson was lauded for her vital role in having kept the label afloat in an article entitled “Atlantic’s ‘Money Man’ Is a Woman.”

  While Jerry Wexler received scant notice in the extensive outlay, he did sign (as Gerald Wexler) an introductory statement in which the partners (including Herb Abramson) proudly noted that during the past decade Atlantic had issued 425 singles, 100 LPs, and 109 extended play records. “We started as young collectors and jazz enthusiasts,” the statement read, “and thought (naively, perhaps) that it would be a ‘ball’ to combine business with our main source of pleasure in life. If the truth be told, we are still fans and amateurs—and hope that we’ll never get so old that we’ll change in this respect.”

  After thanking all the distributors, disc jockeys, retailers, and jukebox operators who had kept Atlantic “alive and healthy for a decade,” the partners concluded by writing, “Our pleasant association with them makes us look forward with keen anticipation to another decade of progress.” A photograph of ten birthday candles blazing away on a turntable strewn with ribbons filled the rest of the page.

 
; On every level, “The Atlantic Records Story, 1948–1958” was an impeccable piece of record business publicity. What seems most remarkable about it now is the incredible litany of companies that felt compelled to take out ads to congratulate the label on its success. In what was then still very much a business of personal relationships where everyone had to stay on the good side of those who paid their bills on time, companies indebted to Atlantic for their continued survival were only too happy to publicly proclaim their loyalty. Nowhere in this extended promotional package could the names of any disc jockeys or the radio stations for whom they worked be found. Insofar as they were concerned, Atlantic was but one of the many suitors vying for attention on their weekly play lists.

  To court their favor, Atlantic played a prominent role in the legendary second annual disc jockey convention sponsored by Todd Storz, the creator of the Top 40 radio format, at the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour, Florida, during the 1959 Memorial Day weekend. At an event that would spawn a thousand stories and be immortalized in a Miami News headline reading, “FOR DEEJAYS: BABES, BOOZE, AND BRIBES,” Ahmet chose to promote his label in his own unique manner.

  Sponsored by nearly fifty record companies including all of the major labels, the convention was “a lavish and lascivious four-day bacchanal” at which 2,500 disc jockeys from all over the country were treated free of charge to “around-the-clock receptions, parties, concerts, and gambling junkets to Havana.” When they arrived at the convention, the deejays were each handed a million dollars in “play money” by RCA so they could begin gambling with it. For every visit they paid to the company’s hospitality suite where “liquid refreshments” were available for free, they received another $5,000 in scrip. On Memorial Day in exchange for the play money, RCA auctioned off a stereo set, a color TV, $500 worth of clothing, a trip for two to Europe, and a Studebaker Lark.