The Last Sultan Read online

  By far the most ambitious member of the band, Stills had already asked Friedman’s neighbor, Dickie Davis, who ran the lights at the Whisky and The Trip, to look at a music publishing contract the band had been offered. When Davis advised Stills not to sign it, he took over from Friedman as the Springfield’s representative and began talking to A&R man Lenny Waronker at Warner Bros. Records. “Overwhelmed by the machinations of the deal,” Davis went to Greene and Stone for advice and “they quickly took over.”

  Their first order of business was to free Stills and Furay from the personal management contracts they had signed with Friedman. According to one account, Greene took Friedman to New York, got him “outrageously stoned,” and then drove him around in a limo without letting him eat until he finally signed a release letting them go. “They said we pulled a gun on Friedman to get the Springfield and that’s not true,” Brian Stone would later say. “The truth is Stephen said, ‘You have to buy this guy out. Get the hippie out of this thing.’ Charlie was going to meet with Friedman and he said, ‘Give me a check for five thousand dollars.’ I said, ‘Charlie, not a check. Take cash.’ Charlie showed him the money in the car. It was hard to turn down and he signed off on them.”

  On June 8, 1966, in return for a $5,000 advance and a 15 percent management fee, Greene and Stone signed Buffalo Springfield to a record deal on their own label, York/Pala Records. They also acquired a 75 percent share of the band’s music publishing for their company, Ten-East Music. Four days later, Wexler called Ahmet in Mexico City with the news that Greene and Stone had an act they wanted him to sign. By then, the managers had already begun buying the band new instruments and renting them cars, for which the musicians would later be billed.

  Despite the $100,000 handshake Ahmet had given Greene and Stone for having brought him Sonny and Cher, Ahmet realized that because other record companies were interested in the group, he would have to sell himself to them to close the deal. While there was no one in the business better suited to the task, he was now faced with the daunting prospect of having to schmooze five fairly stoned young musicians who already knew how good they were after having blown away audiences night after night on the Sunset Strip.

  In a business where all credentials were personal and a big-money deal could hinge on how good a record executive was in the room, Ahmet immediately established his credentials by sitting down with the band on the floor of Greene and Stone’s office so he could tell them why they should sign with Atlantic. As he recalled, “I’ll never forget sitting on the floor in that office doing my best to convince them I was really into their music and they should go with me because of all I could do for their career. Neil looked up at me and asked if I could get him a membership in an L.A. golf club. I was thrown by that one but when I saw he was serious, I said I’d do my best.”

  While Brian Stone doubts “Neil Young ever said that, or if he did, he was joking, because they were kids,” the fact that an elegantly dressed record business legend like Ahmet was perfectly willing to communicate with musicians half his age on their level convinced the band to give Greene and Stone the green light to sign them to Atco. In return for a $12,000 advance, Atlantic took half of the managers’ 75 percent share of the Springfield’s publishing, thereby leaving the five band members and Dickie Davis to split the remaining 25 percent six ways.

  In practical terms, this meant that while Stills, Young, and Furay would receive full songwriting royalties for their work with Buffalo Springfield, each would be paid less than 4.2 percent of the publishing money. On March 15, 1967, Young received a royalty statement from Ten-East Music. The total he had earned amounted to $292.78. Less advances of $131.46 from November 1966 as well as $161.32 that had been applied against loans and advances, he was paid nothing at all.

  While the publishing deal would later cause great acrimony between the band and its managers, a far more immediate set of problems began as soon as Greene and Stone took Buffalo Springfield into the studio in July to begin recording the series of singles that became its first album. As Ahmet would later say, “At one of our first sessions at the old Gold Star studio in Hollywood, the group was tuning up. They tuned up to one another. Then someone hit a note on the piano and they realized they were all out of tune. Then they broke up in hysterical laughter. They kept trying to tune up and kept laughing and this lasted approximately three hours. I finally went to a Spanish guitar maker who had a shop up the street to help them get it together. What they did when they played live never came off on their records because they became much more cerebral when they went into the studio.”

  Right from the start, there was also the inevitable clash of personalities between Stills and Young. “When the group started,” Stone recalled, “they said to us that Richie Furay was the lead singer. Stephen was supposed to be the leader of the group and Neil and Stephen were the lead guitarists but they were always fighting over that. They were at each other’s throats all the time and used to fight about this stuff and Neil eventually wanted to sing his own songs.”

  Even then Young was the loner in the group. His songs were so idiosyncratic and intensely personal that they bore little resemblance to the far more commercial material Stills seemed effortlessly able to generate. In Ahmet’s words, “Stephen’s poetry was earthy, based more on the blues, with a penchant towards Latin grooves. Neil’s music was more abstract. He had a lot of musical thoughts which didn’t make sense to me right away. His voice was odd, shaky. It’s like looking at a Cubist painting in 1920-—if you look at one Picasso, you would say, ‘I don’t know what this is.’ But when you see the whole body of work, it’s a great thing.”

  Except when they were driving one another to new heights while trading guitar leads on stage, Stills and Young had virtually nothing in common. Marching to the beat of a drummer only he could hear, Young would throughout his long career constantly reinvent himself as an artist by recording songs no one else could have written in a variety of musical genres. Far more ambitious and driven than Young, Stills, who in Young’s words was “a great musician,” desperately craved big-time success and “wanted to hang out in London with the Beatles as soon as possible.”

  One day when Young failed to show up for a session or a rehearsal, the always combustible Stills burst into the bungalow where Young was living with his girlfriend in Laurel Canyon, picked up her guitar, and threatened to smash it over Young’s head while screaming, “You’re ruining my career! You’re ruining my career!” When Young began suffering epileptic fits onstage, Stills thought, in Stone’s words, that Young was “full of shit, having one of his phony spells. It was like, ‘He doesn’t want to play the date and now he’s fainting.’ ”

  Neither Stills nor Young liked what they would later say Greene and Stone did to their music in the studio. In Stone’s words, “They were a bunch of kids who had never been in a studio in their lives and knew nothing about recording. They would sit on the floor and not know what they were doing. They would change the levels of their instruments during sessions. They were in the booth with us every minute of every day of everything we ever did. It wasn’t like we took the record away from them. For years, Neil has contended that the record sucks. He and Stephen never stop saying this.”

  The day after the band finished recording the final track of their debut album, Buffalo Springfield, they phoned Greene and Stone and begged them to scrap everything and let them start all over again from scratch. Stone refused to do this and Ahmet, who was eager for product so he could break the Springfield nationwide, backed him up.

  Calling Ahmet “a musician’s businessman” who “knows music,” Young would later say, “Ahmet always said, ‘This record’s not as good as the fuckin’ demos, man.’ . . . Ahmet heard those demos and, based on hearing those demos, signed us to Atlantic. And then Charlie and Brian made a record that was nowhere near as good as those fucking demos.” In fact, Ahmet had already signed the band when they went into the studio to record the demos.

  When
the album was released in December 1966, it went nowhere and the group blamed Greene and Stone. Without a hit, the managers did not know how to promote the band. Unwilling to put the Springfield out on the road as an opening act or relegate them to the club circuit, Greene and Stone allowed the group to languish in L.A.

  Fortunately for all concerned, as Stills drove down from Laurel Canyon on the night of November 13, 1966, he was confronted by a phalanx of helmeted LAPD troopers in full battle gear wielding billy clubs as they cleared thousands of protesters, Sonny and Cher among them, from in front of a club called Pandora’s Box. Responding to demands from the owners of restaurants and nightclubs on Sunset Boulevard to enforce the ten P.M. curfew on the hordes of teenagers who had scared away their far more well-heeled patrons, the LAPD had shown up in force. As Stills would later say, “The Sunset Strip riot [was] just a funeral for a bar. But then you had the immortal genius of the idiots who ran the LAPD, who put all of those troopers in full battle array, looking like the Macedonian army, up against a bunch of kids.”

  After “ingesting hallucinogens,” Stills wrote a song in fifteen minutes about what he had seen. Buffalo Springfield’s only Top Ten hit, it became the first great anthem for the youth rebellion that changed the face of American culture—and helped Ahmet sell tons of records.

  2

  Walking into Brian Stone’s office with his guitar in hand, Stephen Stills said, “Hey, I just wrote a song.” In Stone’s words, “So we walked into Charlie’s office and we said, ‘Let’s hear it.’ Stephen sits down on a chair and says, ‘I’ll play it, for what it’s worth.’ After he finished, we said, ‘That’s fantastic. We have to go right into the studio.’ ‘You like it?’ ‘Stephen, we love it. It’s a great, great song.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Absolutely. It’s sensational.’ ”

  The managers immediately booked studio time at Columbia and on December 5, 1966, Buffalo Springfield quickly cut a song Stills had loosely based on “Murder in My Heart for the Judge” and “The Other Side” by Moby Grape, one of San Francisco’s great psychedelic bands. When Stills complained at the end of the session that he did not have a title for the song, Greene, in his words, said, “Yes, you do. You told me, ‘Let me play this song for you, for what it’s worth.’ For once Stephen agreed with me.”

  With Stills sitting in their office a day later, Greene and Stone played a dub of the song over the phone for Ahmet in New York. “The guys in the band were all kind of neutral about it,” Stone would later say, “and we didn’t tell Ahmet who it was and he said, ‘It’s sensational, man. It’s sensational. Who is it?’ ‘Ahmet, good news. It’s Buffalo Springfield.’ And he went crazy. He was just delirious. ‘I love it, man. We gotta put that out right away. But I got a couple of comments. What’s the name of it?’ ”

  When the managers told him Stills called it “For What It’s Worth,” Ahmet said, “No, man. That’s no good. You can’t call it that. You can say it in the song. You should call it, ‘Hey, What’s That Sound?’ ” Stills, who was listening to every word, said he was not about to call it that and “was really pissed.” Ahmet then said, “The line, ‘There’s a man with a gun over there,’ that’s bad. You gotta change that.” In Stone’s words, “He thought it was too explicit and he was right. We said, ‘Stephen, Ahmet doesn’t like that line. Is there anything you can do with that?’ Stephen looked up and said, ‘No, man. That’s the song. I’m not changing it.’ Ahmet said, ‘Well, all right, man.’ ”

  The first direct confrontation between the head of the label and his ambitious young artist ended in a grammatical draw. Stills got to keep the line about the man with a gun but Greene and Stone appeased Ahmet by enclosing the title he had suggested within a set of parentheses before the one Stills preferred.

  Three days later, an acetate of “(Stop, Hey What’s That Sound) For What It’s Worth” was being played repeatedly in L.A. by Greene and Stone’s favorite radio station, KHJ. Because Stills had so accurately “captured the paranoia in the air, circa early 1967,” the song became a Top Ten hit. Doing all he could to break the band, Ahmet replaced “Don’t Scold Me” with “For What It’s Worth” on the Springfield’s debut album and then rereleased it.

  He also advanced Greene and Stone the money to bring the band to New York to play at Ondine’s, a hip discotheque at 308 East 59th Street between First and Second Avenues where Jimi Hendrix had performed with Curtis Knight and the Squires in 1965 and where the Doors had made their New York debut a year later. On any given night, girls in miniskirts could be found dancing at Ondine’s until three in the morning as Jackie Kennedy, Faye Dunaway, Sonny and Cher, celebrity hair dresser Monte Rock III, and Eric Burdon of the Animals mingled with bikers who had parked their motorcycles alongside the limousines outside the front door.

  Most definitely Ahmet’s kind of place, there could not have been a more unlikely venue for a band like Buffalo Springfield to make its East Coast debut. And yet, as he would later say, “When they performed there, man, there was no band I ever heard that had the electricity of that group. That was the most exciting group I’ve ever seen, bar none. It was just mind-boggling.”

  In New York, things went no better for the Springfield than they had in Los Angeles. Onstage one night in Ondine’s, Stills slapped Bruce Palmer across the face because his bass was too loud. Palmer responded by knocking Stills through the drum set. After suffering a seizure onstage, Young staggered into a hallway at the disco, where a woman had to insert a pencil into his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue. After Palmer was busted for pot at the two-room suite at the Wellington Hotel, where all five musicians were staying while Greene and Stone resided in luxury at the Plaza, the bass player was sent back to Canada.

  One night at Ondine’s, the band did get to perform with one of the greatest soul singers who ever lived. “Dewey Martin knew Otis Redding,” Stone recalled, “and he said, ‘I called Otis and he’s coming to see us tonight.’ Everybody thought Dewey was full of shit.” After Redding walked into the club, the band brought him up to the stage to join them but, as Atlantic’s fast-talking FM promotion man Mario Medious recalled, “Otis was so drunk that when he took a bow, he fell over. But then he sang with them and he was fantastic.”

  Ahmet, who was also at the club that night, was delighted. By then, Wexler had already signed a lucrative distribution deal with Stax, the Memphis label for whom Redding recorded. The singer was doing so well for Atlantic that Ahmet never bothered to tell him his older brother’s name was not “Nescafe.” Nor did Ahmet correct Redding when he called him “Omelet” in the mistaken belief “that he liked omelets and that was why they called him that, like a guy who liked hamhocks would be called Hamhock.”

  On January 9, 1967, Buffalo Springfield cut Neil Young’s “Mr. Soul” at the Atlantic studio at 1841 Broadway. Brian Stone would later confirm that Charlie Greene hit Stephen Stills in the mouth during this session. Whether or not this actually happened, it was the last time Greene, whom his partner would later describe as “kinda like the manager’s equivalent to Stephen Stills,” ever spoke to the musician. As Stone would also say, “Otis Redding was at that session. He said, ‘Holy shit, I love that song, man. I want to record it. I’m gonna cut that song, man.’ ”

  Without ever having done so, Redding died eleven months later at the age of twenty-six when the plane on which he was traveling with four members of his band crashed into a lake in Wisconsin. Wexler first heard the news at the airport just after he had picked up the master tapes of “Dock of the Bay,” a song that then became a huge posthumous hit for Redding. When Ahmet came home to Mica that night, he sat down on the sofa and cried.

  Although Charlie Greene and Brian Stone were credited as having produced “Mr. Soul,” they never recorded the band again. “I never really thought of them as producers,” Ahmet said. “Look, don’t get me wrong—I like Greene and Stone. They were funny. They were also hustlers. And you know—you don’t want to have a hustler hustle you.” In Stone’s words, “Ahmet
used to say to us, ‘Stop being producers. You’re just managers. Why do you keep trying to make records? It causes such aggravation. Stop producing. Just manage.’ ” After Buffalo Springfield hired the same attorney Sonny and Cher had employed to free themselves from Greene and Stone, the band ended its relationship with its managers.

  At some point during this period, Charlie Greene got married at the Plaza Hotel. Ahmet and Wexler attended the festivities. After the event, Greene asked Wexler for a $78,000 dollar loan. “They were repossessing our cars,” Stone recalled. “We needed the loan because they were locking us out of our offices. Buffalo Springfield was not a giant act and on top of that, they were crazy and hating each other and wanted to split up.”

  In Jerry Wexler’s words, “Greene and Stone were constantly hitting on us, and we were constantly bailing them out. They came to the well again and again until the pitcher broke. Listen, we were completely aware of their hype—it was a deal where they knew that we knew that they knew that we knew. But the bottom line was, it was a very productive relationship. Also—we enjoyed them. We enjoyed the scoundrel, scamp aspect of them.” After Wexler had agreed to the advance, Ahmet, in Stone’s words, “called Wexler from L.A. where he had been talking to the Springfield and said to Jerry, ‘I’m flying back tonight. Don’t give them any money till I get back. Not until I talk to them.’ We were freaked out.”

  When the managers met with Ahmet the next day, he told them, as Stone said, “ ‘Listen, I’ll loan you the money only on the condition you guys release the Buffalo Springfield.’ He kept saying, ‘I’m telling you, there’s no more group. The guys are all splitting up. Neil is going off by himself. Stephen doesn’t want anything to do with anybody. Richie is going to start another group.’ I said to Ahmet, ‘I will let these guys out on the condition that if they ever reassemble or you are in some way involved in their records, I get a piece.’ And he said, ‘Fine.’ He never signed the agreement and we got nothing for Crosby, Stills, Nash. Nothing. I did it because Ahmet said they were splitting up and because he was making us this loan but Ahmet kind of conned us into that. He really did.”