The Last Sultan Read online

  As Joe Smith, a Yale graduate who would become the president of Warner Bros. Records but was then a very popular AM disc jockey in Boston, would later say, “I was one of the board members of that convention in Miami Beach. I had just been married so I took my wife there. I was playing blackjack and I went bust and the guy gave me more chips. She said, ‘Aren’t you supposed to lose?’ I said, ‘Shhh. I can never lose. So long as my ratings are up there.’ ”

  Nonstop gambling was not the only divertissement offered to the disc jockeys over the course of the holiday weekend. Then seventeen years old, Marshall Chess would remember smoking pot for the first time at the convention. Long before it became a staple of the hippie culture during the 1960s, marijuana was widely available in the music business and, as he recalled, “They were bringing pot into the Brill Building in New York in these big garbage bags and selling it for twenty dollars an ounce. They called it ‘mezz.’ ”

  The convention also featured what writer William Barlow called “one of the largest contingents of hookers ever assembled at a hotel in Miami Beach” with some prostitutes having been “recruited from as far away as New York City.” In Marshall Chess’s words, “I remember Ahmet and all these other guys at the convention standing in a circle and there was a guy in the middle fucking a whore and everyone was throwing hundred-dollar bills betting on how long he could fuck her.”

  In the words of Paul Marshall, who attended the event, “Ahmet hired a certain number of hookers. However, he got them gowns and introduced them as the cream of Miami debutante society. And he told them he would double their fee if they did not have sex with the guests. After Jerry Blaine had danced with them all, he made a pass at one and she slapped him across the face. We were all beside ourselves because all the Atlantic people knew they were hookers.”

  Morris Levy of Roulette Records, who in Paul Marshall’s words was “in the mob” and “ran about eighty or ninety hat check concessions in nightclubs” in New York City, spent $15,000 for an all-night barbecue that featured the Count Basie band. Half the money went to pay for two thousand bottles of bourbon. All told, the estimated cost of the weekend for the record companies was $250,000.

  At “a great breakfast Atlantic gave at that convention,” the featured speaker was the comedian Professor Irwin Corey. Decked out in seedy formal attire and sneakers, Corey, who billed himself as “The World’s Foremost Authority,” would deliver long, rambling monologues filled with double talk that would suddenly make eminent sense while also being incredibly funny. “Remember,” Marshall would later say, “these were disc jockeys from Keokuk, Iowa. They introduced him as ‘Professor Irwin Corey from Harvard University, an expert in the field,’ and he said, ‘And, as one of the great leaders of the phonographic industry, Mr. Morris Levy, has said, “A man can get further in the music industry with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.” ’ And nobody laughed. But at the dais, we all fell over.”

  The event was such an ostentatious public demonstration of the overwhelming power wielded by the nation’s disc jockeys as well as the outrageous lengths to which record companies would go to service their every need that the ensuing “media frenzy” over what was characterized as a full-fledged orgy caught the attention of the Legislative Oversight Subcommittee of the United States House Interstate Commerce Committee. In February 1960, fresh from its news-making exposé of the networks’ rigged quiz shows, the subcommittee began public hearings into payola, the form of commercial bribery that had for years been standard practice in the music industry.

  “When I first started working for King Records in 1958,” Bob Krasnow, the founder of Blue Thumb Records, remembered, “I paid off everybody. It was just the thing to do. If you didn’t pay to play, you didn’t get played. One of my jobs was to call on Dick Clark. I couldn’t pay off Dick so I figured out if I could get my records on WIBG radio in Philadelphia, Dick would hear them and that would grease the way.”

  The top jock at WIBG was Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue, who after the payola scandal broke moved to San Francisco, where in 1967 he transformed KMPX into the first alternative free-form FM rock radio station in America. “Tom Donahue was one of my great mentors,” Krasnow recalled, “and I was awed by him. I brought him a record one day and I had money on me to take care of him and he listened to the record and he said, ‘Wow, that’s a grand record, man.’ Then he looked me straight in the face and said, ‘No, Bob, that’s a two grand record.’ I realized what mercenaries they were. I thought the guy liked me.”

  On May 19, 1960, along with the program director at WINS and five other deejays, among them Hal Jackson, for whom Ahmet had written “The House That Jack Built,” which became Jackson’s radio show theme song in Washington, Alan Freed was arrested for taking payola. In a continuing drama reminiscent of the recent quiz show hearings that received front-page newspaper coverage all over the country, one well-known disc jockey after another appeared before the committee to admit their complicity in a practice that had been an industry standard for decades.

  The hearings effectively destroyed Alan Freed’s career, and he died a broken man five years later at the age of forty-four. Dick Clark, who was also called to testify before the subcommittee and steadfastly denied ever taking payola, survived as the host of American Bandstand after being forced by ABC television to divest himself of his own extensive record business interests.

  The only two labels who never signed the Federal Trade Commission consent decree stipulating that record companies would no longer engage in payola were Chess and Atlantic, both of whom were represented by Paul Marshall. As he would later say, “When I read the decree, I noticed the big companies like RCA and CBS had signed it but that my clients were being asked to sign it as corporations and as individuals. So I looked up the law and I determined there was no crime. There was no statute which made payola illegal.”

  The theory behind the commercial bribery statute under which Alan Freed had been prosecuted for taking payola was that money paid to the deejays should have been paid to their employers. However, existing Federal Communications Commission rules prohibited radio station owners from receiving such payments. “Therefore the money wasn’t being diverted,” Marshall contended. “They weren’t paying the owner and they couldn’t pay the owner. They paid the disc jockey. And I likened it to a tip. If any establishment says you can give our employees special favors or benefits, then it didn’t lose anything. Ergo, there was no money stolen.”

  Marshall also argued that the only deejays paid to play music on the air were those who already had “a very substantial audience.” Since “the crime consisted of changing and affecting public taste,” the fact that “people had already accepted these guys before they ever got paid” made this charge also impossible to prove. In Marshall’s words, “There used to be songs called ‘turntable hits’ which got a lot of play but never sold a record.”

  In the end, the 1960 payola scandal affected only the major labels, which then began hiring third-party promotion men who would sign contracts acknowledging they could, in Marshall’s words, “never talk to a disc jockey even if he was his brother. By signing it, they made the government happy and they could say, ‘Look, they’re doing what they can do.’ It was all bullshit.”

  “In the very beginning,” Ahmet admitted, “I made a lot of friends among disc jockeys and they played my records. A few would look for favors of one kind or another. And we were in a position where we really had to deliver some favors to get our records played. When there were very important stations that were playing our competition much more than us, we would go see what we could do to befriend those people. And sometimes they would ask for some remuneration which we very often came through with. After the first payola investigations, we hired other people to look after that and I think that was the position most record companies were in all over the world.”

  At both the convention in Miami Beach and then during the public hearings that ruined the lives and careers of disc
jockeys throughout America, Ahmet and his label somehow managed yet again to emerge unscathed. The partners at Atlantic went right on doing business as usual by putting money into the hands of those who could make or break their latest releases by playing them on the air.

  3

  Far more than the death of his father or the failure of his marriage, the overwhelming sense of personal loss Ahmet experienced when the artist he loved and respected above all others left Atlantic shook him to the very core of his being. After a decade in the business, Ahmet learned for the first time that his relationship with those who recorded for him was based on mutual need and so would always end in time. Despite how close he would become to many of his artists over the next five decades, Ahmet never made the same mistake again.

  Along with Jerry Wexler, Ahmet was in the Atlantic office on the night of February 18, 1959, when his great favorite Ray Charles cut a song he had regularly been performing with his band. Running more than seven and a half minutes, “What’d I Say” began with Charles playing a very rapid, raunchy, and completely irresistible riff on electric piano for a minute and a half before finally singing a series of lines including the one about the girl with the diamond ring who really knew how to shake that thing from “Mess Around.”

  More than four minutes into the track, Charles suddenly stopped singing and playing. As his biographer Michael Lydon wrote, “Immediately a gaggle of men and women’s voices rise in protest. They want the music to keep going, and though pretending he doesn’t understand, Ray starts again” by exchanging a series of guttural sexual moans and grunts with his female backup singers, “the grunts each time becoming more edged with sexual pleasure until Ray is screaming, the ladies moaning, and the band rocking. Out of the ecstatic tumult come exhortations to ‘Shake that thing,’ and the general agreement, ‘Don’t it make you feel all right!’ ”

  Combining elements of jazz, gospel, and the call-and-response of Mississippi Delta field blues into a mind-blowing synthesis of filthy funk and nonstop driving rhythm, the track was unlike anything anyone had ever heard before, much less recorded. Understandably, neither Ahmet nor Wexler knew what to do with a cut they thought had “dance-craze possibilities” until Tom Dowd edited out “unwanted choruses and telescoped the track to two three-minute sides of a 45 entitled “What’d I Say Parts I & II.”

  Realizing “they had a record too hot for spring release,” the partners decided to hold it back until June so it could become “the dance hit of the summer.” Ray Charles’s first Top Ten hit, “What’d I Say” spent fifteen weeks on the pop charts and became the number one R&B single. The song sold a million copies, making it the artist’s first gold record.

  A landmark track that broke down the barriers of what was then considered suitable for radio play, “What’d I Say” became, as Lydon wrote, “the life of a million parties, the spark of as many romances, a song to date the summer by.” When a seventeen-year-old bass player named Paul McCartney first heard the song in Liverpool, chills went up and down his spine and he suddenly knew what he wanted to do with his musical career.

  A bigger hit by far than “I Got a Woman” had been four years earlier, “What’d I Say” brought Ray Charles the largest royalties of his career. It also raised his price on the road and made “a fortune” for Atlantic by contributing to “the label’s first-ever million-dollar month in gross sales.” For Ahmet and Wexler, the only bad news was that since Ray Charles’s contract with the label was about to expire in the fall, they would now have to come up with a much better offer to re-sign him.

  Aside from how much both partners valued Ray Charles as an artist, their need to keep him on Atlantic was compounded by the fact that when Clyde McPhatter’s contract with Atlantic had ended in March, he had signed with MGM Records for a guaranteed income of $50,000 a year. United Artists and Warner Bros. Records had also bid for his services, thereby making it plain that major labels were now eager to acquire black artists.

  A performer whom Ahmet called “a singer from heaven with the most lyrical voice,” McPhatter had put together the Drifters after being fired from Billy Ward and the Dominoes. At his first session for Atlantic, Wexler cut “Money Honey” with him and the cut went to number one on the R&B charts. Ahmet then wrote what Wexler considered his greatest song for McPhatter, a direct forerunner of “The Twist” entitled “Whatcha Gonna Do,” but the record went nowhere. McPhatter had another hit with “Honey Love,” which Wexler cowrote. Then McPhatter was drafted. When he returned from the army, Herb Abramson produced a hit entitled “Seven Days” and then had him cut “Treasure of Love,” a number one R&B hit in 1956.

  After finally breaking through to the white market with “A Lover’s Question” in 1958, McPhatter jumped ship at Atlantic and took the big money offered by MGM. Despite what McPhatter had done, Ahmet and Wexler still felt that they could re-sign Ray Charles.

  What neither man knew was that Larry Myers, a young agent in the Billy Shaw agency, had already decided the best thing he could do for Ray Charles was get him off Atlantic. By continuing to record for what Myers viewed as a black label, Charles, who was then earning a thousand dollars a night on the road, would remain “stuck in a black world” and would never be able to make the kind of money paid only to musicians who entertained white audiences in America.

  When Myers presented his case to Milt Shaw, who after the death of his brother Billy had begun managing Charles, Shaw told him Atlantic had been doing a great job with the singer and he was not eager to encourage him to leave the label. Myers eventually persuaded Shaw to tell Charles he should wait to re-sign with Atlantic in the hope a major label might offer him a better deal. What in time would become a classic music business ploy achieved one immediate result.

  Suddenly worried that Charles might actually be thinking about leaving Atlantic, Ahmet and Wexler began doing all they could to re-sign him. Ahmet flew to the Midwest twice with a contract for Charles to sign only to realize the artist was avoiding him. To no avail, Ahmet offered one of Charles’s close associates a payment of $5,000 or $10,000 if he could persuade the singer to stay at Atlantic.

  Working behind the scenes, Myers went to ABC-Paramount Records, a major label that had been founded four years earlier by Sam Clark, a record distributor from Boston who had been given half a million dollars by Leonard Goldenson to bring ABC into the record business. A most unlikely bidder for Charles’s services, the label had released thoroughly white-bread hits like “A Rose and a Baby Ruth” by George Hamilton IV and Paul Anka’s “Diana” while also distributing teenage smashes on the Chancellor label by American Bandstand pop idols Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Lloyd Price, their first black artist, had scored a hit with “Personality” but the song had little in common with the kind of gutbucket soul that had become Ray Charles’s stock in trade.

  As Myers soon learned, ABC-Paramount was not only eager to sign Ray Charles but were also willing to offer him the kind of deal no artist in the record business had ever been given before. After Milt Shaw told Charles to meet with ABC-Paramount in October 1959, Sam Clark offered to let Charles produce his own records, which the label would then distribute for a fee. Clark told Charles he would sell far more records on a major label, thereby enabling him to attract white audiences to his shows. Once his records had earned back their advance, Charles would earn 75 cents on the dollar for each copy sold. The singer would also be guaranteed an annual income of $50,000 on a three-year contract.

  After telling Clark to write up a formal proposal so he could show it to the partners at Atlantic and give them a chance to match the offer, Charles said he also wanted to own his masters. By doing so, he would control all the rights to recordings he would make for ABC-Paramount, thereby cutting the label out of all future profits after his contract with them was over.

  As no record company had ever before entered into such an agreement, Clark told him this would not be possible. Charles, who was bluffing and was already willing to accept the offer, insisted that
without this provision there would be no deal. After thinking about it, Clark offered to let Charles have his masters back after five years. As Charles’s lawyer told him, not even Frank Sinatra had ever gotten this kind of deal.

  Taking the ABC-Paramount offer to Ahmet and Wexler, Charles said if they matched it, he would stay at Atlantic. Telling the artist they loved him, the partners said they could not possibly agree to such a deal but left the meeting thinking negotiations had only just begun and they would have the opportunity to talk with him again. Ahmet in particular was confident the deal would eventually be done because he was not only the first to have recognized Ray Charles’s talent but had also allowed him to do as he liked in the studio, thereby enabling Charles to transform himself into the great artist he had become.

  While Charles had rewarded Ahmet’s faith by making great records, both partners had also done all they could to push his releases because of their unwavering faith in him. Both Ahmet and Wexler felt certain Charles would stay on the label that had for so long been his home rather than sign with a “soulless corporation” where no one would ever love or understand his music as well as they did.

  At what was then the most expensive session in the history of Atlantic, Nesuhi had brought in the entire Count Basie band and half of the Duke Ellington orchestra to join Ray Charles’s own band in the studio. With more than forty musicians behind him, the singer cut twelve standards (six of which were produced by Wexler), thereby demonstrating he could do far more than sing his own brand of gospel-charged rhythm and blues.