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  Desperate to latch on to the British Invasion in any way possible, Atlantic did release an album entitled Ain’t She Sweet in October 1964. The LP included four tracks recorded in 1961 by English rocker Tony Sheridan with the Beatles in Hamburg, Germany, as well as eight cover versions of Beatles songs by a group called the Swallows. Not surprisingly, the album did not sell.

  With all this as backdrop and subtext, the stage had now been set for a melodramatic lunch in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel that would set Ahmet at odds with his partner for years while leaving Jerry Wexler wondering exactly what he had done to cause his friend to think he had betrayed him.

  2

  Arguably the greatest songwriting duo in the history of rock ’n’ roll, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller first met Ahmet and Jerry Wexler in the Russian Tea Room on the night of July 26, 1956, a date Stoller would never forget for more than one reason. Earlier in the day, he and his wife had arrived safely in New York after having been rescued at sea following the collision in heavy fog of the Andrea Doria, the Italian ocean liner on which they had been traveling, with the Stockholm of the Swedish American Line.

  Having survived an authentic maritime disaster in which forty-six of their fellow passengers on the Andrea Doria as well as five crew members on the Stockholm had been killed, Stoller and his wife were greeted on the dock by Jerry Leiber, who had flown in from Los Angeles to meet them with some incredibly good news. Elvis Presley had just covered “Hound Dog,” a song the duo had written for Big Mama Thornton that had gone to number one on the R&B charts. Backed with “Don’t Be Cruel,” Presley’s version became a smash hit that sold four million copies.

  Then just twenty-three years old, Leiber and Stoller had already established a track record as songwriters that was second to none. As teenagers in Los Angeles, they had written hits like “Riot in Cell Block #9” and “Kansas City.” Going into business with Lester Sill, who had discovered Leiber while he was working in a record store on Fairfax Avenue, they founded Spark Records and released “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” by a five-man vocal group known as the Robins. Impressed by their talent, Nesuhi sent the record to Ahmet in New York.

  When Spark folded, Ahmet and Wexler picked up the record and put it out on Atco, where it sold a quarter of a million copies. Leiber and Stoller then began writing and producing songs by the Coasters, a group formed from the remnants of the Robins, with Carl Gardner singing lead, that were released on Atco. The two sets of partners did not meet until they all found themselves in New York. The four men hit it off immediately and began a fantastic run of success for all concerned.

  A musical genius who had begun taking piano lessons when he was five years old, Mike Stoller had studied with James P. Johnson, whom Ahmet had met during his wild night out in New York City at the age of thirteen. Born into a Yiddish-speaking household in a tough working-class neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, the brilliant lyricist Jerry Leiber was by far the more boisterous and aggressive of the partners. Much like Jerry Wexler, Leiber had also never walked away from a fight while growing up.

  In 1957, Leiber and Stoller, who by then had signed a distribution deal with Atlantic, moved to New York to set up shop. A year later, their incredibly infectious “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters helped Atlantic cross over into the white teenage market. As both Ahmet and Wexler would soon learn, they had finally met a pair of partners who were as difficult to control as they.

  After cutting “There Goes My Baby” with the Drifters in March 1959, Leiber and Stoller brought the tape to Wexler, who was so offended by it that he “automatically started yelling while eating a tuna fish sandwich—bits of which consequently ended up all over the wall as he kept shouting, ‘Goddamn awful trash! How can you play a tape like that for me? That tune is being played in three different keys, it sounds like three stations playing at the same time coming through on one very bad car radio!’ ”

  Stoller would later remember Ahmet trying to be diplomatic by explaining that although the duo made great records, no one could “hit a home run every time.” Depending on which version of the story Leiber chose to tell, Ahmet said the song was interesting, thereby causing Wexler to stalk out of the room, or, even as Leiber was apologizing for the track, Ahmet said, “Smash! You’ve got a hit record and you don’t even know it.” When Leiber replied, “This is a full-of-shit record,” Ahmet said, “Boy, that’s the kind of shit I need.” After Leiber and Tom Dowd remixed the song, it went to number one on both the R&B and pop charts.

  That four men with such powerful personalities could agree on anything was a minor miracle. In 1961, after Phil Spector had established himself as the first superstar producer, Leiber and Stoller asked that their names also be included as producers on their records. Outraged by what then became standard practice in the industry, Wexler was eventually forced to concede to their demand.

  As always in the record business, the real issue was money. In addition to being given credit for their work in the studio, Leiber and Stoller also wanted to be paid a producer’s royalty on each record sold. “At that time,” Miriam Bienstock would later say, “there weren’t many producers—especially ones getting royalties. As a principal in the company, I just didn’t want to pay it.”

  Knowing they could not afford to offend the hit makers who were helping keep Atlantic in business, Ahmet and Wexler gave in on this point as well. Because the agreement was informal, Leiber and Stoller’s attorney then asked to audit Atlantic’s books. The request mightily offended Wexler, who began referring to the pair as “Mr. Lust and Mr. Greed.” In his autobiography, Wexler would also call Leiber, with whom he had much in common, “Mr. Disorderly Conduct.”

  When the audit revealed that during their six years at Atlantic the duo had been underpaid by $18,000, Leiber was willing to drop the issue and just go on doing business as they had before. Stoller however wanted the full amount to be paid. At what began as a “relaxed and friendly” meeting, the pair presented their case to Ahmet and Wexler. “Fine,” Ahmet said. “I’ll pay the eighteen thousand, but I don’t ever want to do business with you guys again.” Taking the same position, Wexler said the pair could have their money but forget about ever working again with the Drifters, the Coasters, or Ben E. King.

  Leiber and Stoller dropped their demand but when Ahmet and Wexler assigned Spector to work with the Drifters in the studio on a record the duo thought they would be producing, they left Atlantic and went to work for United Artists. While, in Leiber’s words, “the big falling out was really with Jerry,” the more lasting rift was with Ahmet, who “took offense at a situation in which we were wronged. He has always been like that. I think he was offended because he was in the wrong, and I think he was embarrassed. I don’t think he has ever gotten over it.”

  After forming two unsuccessful labels, Leiber and Stoller reached out to a fabled record business character named George Goldner with an offer he was in no financial position to refuse. If Goldner could successfully promote the first release on the songwriters’ new label, Red Bird Records, they would give him a stake in the company. After “Chapel of Love” by the Dixie Cups became the first in a long string of hits by the Shangri-Las, the Jellybeans, and the Ad-Libs, Goldner joined the label as a partner.

  A man who dressed like Jay Gatsby but lived like Meyer Wolfsheim, George Goldner had by the time he went into business with Leiber and Stoller already founded Tico, Gee, Rama, Gone, End, and Roulette Records only to be forced to sell them all to Morris Levy to cover his gambling debts. Known as “The Mambo King” for his lifelong love of Latin music, Goldner had also discovered and produced Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, Little Anthony & the Imperials, the Flamingos, the Cleftones, and the Chantels.

  In the words of Sire Records founder Seymour Stein, who worked as Goldner’s assistant at Red Bird, “George was a reckless gambler who had amazing ears. He was very good-looking, vain, well dressed, and immaculate and he bought all his clothes at Cy Martin, a famous store on Broadway. George not only gambled
at the racetrack, he would gamble looking at a girl in the street wondering which way she would cross it.”

  At Red Bird, Leiber and Stoller soon discovered Goldner was making money by pressing and shipping thousands of copies of every hit on the label to California, where they were then sold for the benefit of George Goldner Enterprises. Deciding they could neither afford to lose Goldner nor continue supporting “his destructive addiction to the racetrack,” the songwriters began looking for a way to control him. It was then, as Leiber recalled, that Jerry Wexler called the duo from “out of the blue” to propose a merger between Red Bird and Atlantic.

  At a time when “Red Bird was red hot and Atlantic was ice cold,” the merger seemed like a marriage made in heaven. Leiber and Stoller had the creativity and Atlantic had a first-rate sales and distribution setup. Accepting Wexler’s invitation to get together and talk, Leiber said he would bring Stoller and Goldner to a meeting over lunch at the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel along with their attorney, Lee Eastman, whose daughter Linda would later marry Paul McCartney. Born Leopold Epstein, Eastman had already incurred the wrath of the partners at Atlantic when he insisted his clients audit the label’s books.

  While the songwriters would later say the merger would have profited all concerned while also putting Goldner under the watchful eye of Jerry Wexler, “who would catch him if he were stealing,” an entirely different plan may have also been in place. Seymour Stein would later recall Goldner telling him before the meeting, “Can you believe it? We may be buying Atlantic Records.”

  Sitting down under the high-vaulted ceiling of the Oak Room, the six men set about discussing their business. Setting the tone for what was to come by putting away two martinis before the salads had been served, Goldner was working on a third when he looked across the table at Ahmet and said, “Who needs a label that’s going down the toilet?” When Ahmet replied, “We’re hardly going down the toilet,” Goldner retorted, “With the shit you’re putting out, it won’t be long.”

  Apologizing for their partner’s behavior, Leiber and Stoller cancelled Goldner’s order for a fourth martini. As the conversation turned to the subject at hand, Eastman kept up the assault by pointing out “it was absolutely unreasonable to see how this merger could benefit anyone but Atlantic.” When Wexler protested that no one had yet even heard the terms, Eastman said the terms were beside the point—Atlantic had little to offer and Red Bird had everything. Having not yet fully grasped what was going on, Ahmet said, “I didn’t know we were prepared to make a formal offer.”

  Heaping more fuel on the roaring fire he had helped start, Goldner said, “Him and Wexler are supposed to be running Atlantic, but the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Looks to me like they’re just jerking each other off. Aside from a free lunch, this is a waste of time.” When Eastman agreed, Leiber and Stoller looked at one another in confusion but by then Ahmet and Wexler had already left the table. “Can you imagine?” Leiber would later say. “George is like a beggar that came out of the gutter and all of a sudden he put on king’s clothing, and was sitting at a table with Ahmet, who was the duke of Windsor—all of a sudden this panhandler was making demands of the duke of Windsor.”

  Both songwriters would later insist Goldner had done all he could to sabotage the deal so he could keep his profitable backdoor operation going by not having to report to the partners at Atlantic. They also maintained that Lee Eastman, who was receiving 5 percent of the duo’s writing and producing income while also being paid to represent Red Bird, did not want the merger to go through because Leiber and Stoller would then be using Atlantic’s lawyers rather than him.

  But it was not Lee Eastman or George Goldner who upset Ahmet at the Oak Room that day. At some point during the conversation, Leiber said that he and Stoller, Goldner, and Wexler had been talking about buying out Ahmet. According to Ahmet, Leiber also said if Ahmet refused the offer, Wexler had told them he would do the deal without him. In Ahmet’s words, “There was only one problem—it was my company.” And there it was. The bone of contention that would stick in Ahmet’s throat for the rest of his life.

  What Ahmet believed Paul Marshall had done to him with the Beatles was nothing compared to this. Without his knowledge, Jerry Wexler had gone behind his back to talk to others about buying Atlantic. For Ahmet, there could be no greater sin. When he went home that day, Ahmet was, in Mica’s words, “truly upset and said Jerry had tried to take the company from him.” As Ahmet would later say, “That was the beginning of a break of faith between myself and Jerry.”

  Admitting the merger was “mishandled” and “There are some things in life that you wish you could go back and do differently,” Wexler would always insist that taking Atlantic away from Ahmet was never what he had intended. In a chapter in his autobiography aptly entitled “Rashomon at the Oak Room,” Wexler would go to great lengths to flatly deny the charge.

  Not that the partners ever discussed the matter. To have even brought it up would have been for Ahmet an admission of weakness as well as an acknowledgment of how badly the partners still needed one another to keep the label going. And so Ahmet let the wound fester. This too was entirely in keeping with his character. Years later, Ahmet said, “It is a testament to my relationship with Jerry Wexler that we could continue to be on friendly terms.” The sad fact of the matter was that after that fateful lunch at the Oak Room, nothing between two of the greatest record men in history was ever the same again.

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  Because records were sold for cash, it was always a business that interested the mob. On any given evening in New York City, wiseguys in expensive suits could be found in many of the clubs Ahmet frequented and it always pleased them to be seated at the best table in the house and then be able to impress their wives, mistresses, or girlfriends by having the featured performer show respect by stopping by for a drink and some pleasant conversation.

  Since none of the mobsters knew the first thing about how records were actually made, it was virtually impossible for them to control the product on which the industry was based. Instead, they lurked in the shadows, looking to pick up loose change whenever and wherever they could. As Wexler described the mob’s involvement, “The Mafia would like to control the record industry, but they have never managed to. They’re just on the fringes: selling cut-out records, pressing, independent promotion.”

  The most notable exception was Morris Levy, who was connected and so was able to run Roulette Records with impunity. While “Moish,” as he was known to his many friends in the industry, has become the whipping boy for organized crime in the record business, those who did not have to do business with him had nothing but good things to say about the man. In Paul Marshall’s words, “Morris looked like an animal and talked like he was out of the movies and his house in New Jersey was really a funny place to be. I remember sitting by his pool one day having a discussion about philosophy and he said, ‘Well, Koik-a-gahd said . . . You know, Koik-a-gahd.’ He was talking about Kierkegaard and I was sitting there trying to keep a straight face.”

  After Mica met Levy for the first time at the Peppermint Lounge, she told Ahmet, “He invited us to go to his house in New Jersey. How exciting. And Ahmet said, ‘You’ll never go there. I want to be on good terms with him but never get too close.’ ” Despite how charming Levy could be, Ahmet was always careful to maintain his distance from him as well as all those in the business whom he knew had mob connections.

  It was a lesson Blue Thumb Records founder Bob Krasnow learned one day when he walked into the Roulette Records office to collect some money Levy owed him. “I brought this guy with me who was like six-five and could barely speak, not even Italian,” Krasnow recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t need to see Mr. Levy. Just give me my money.’ And they said, ‘What money?’ I never got the money and they told me to leave the country. That was when in the record business, there was an adventure every five minutes.”

  When Jerry Wexler was interviewed by Dorothy Wade
and Justine Picardie in 1989 for their book, Music Man, he offered up a veritable primer on Mafia involvement in the record business. Wexler told the English journalists the easiest way for the mob to gain control of a record label was when some highly placed executive came to them for money he could find nowhere else and then made the wiseguys “silent partners” in the enterprise. After Leiber and Stoller realized this was precisely what George Goldner had done at Red Bird Records, they sold the label to him for a dollar. A few months later, Goldner sold off all the Red Bird masters to raise yet more cash.

  According to Wexler, a label could also find itself in business with the mob if it asked for “a favor” for which the company would then be expected to do something in return. In Wexler’s words, “We were very, very careful not to do any of those things.” Despite his staunch disclaimer, Wexler’s expertise on the subject came from firsthand experience. In 1965, the partners at Atlantic went into business with Bert Berns, a brilliant songwriter and producer who belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Using the first letter of each of the partners’ names (Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and Gerald), they formed an offshoot of Atlantic entitled Bang Records whose label bore the unfortunate but very telling image of a gun.

  Over the course of his brilliant career, Bert Berns wrote and produced hits like “A Little Bit of Soap” by the Jarmels, “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers, “Cry to Me” and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” by Solomon Burke (which then became a hit for Wilson Pickett), “Tell Him” by the Exciters, “Cry Baby” by Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, “Baby I’m Yours” by Barbara Lewis, “Here Comes the Night” by Them, with Van Morrison, “I Want Candy” by the Strangeloves, “Hang on Sloopy” by the McCoys, “Are You Lonely for Me, Baby” by Freddie Scott, and “Piece of My Heart,” a song originally recorded by Erma Franklin that then became a breakthrough smash for Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin singing lead.