The Last Sultan Page 25

  The year after Warner-Seven Arts acquired Atlantic Records for about $17.5 million (the modern-day equivalent of around $115 million), “the earnings doubled and the year after that, the earnings doubled again.” While, in Hirschfield’s words, “Jerry and Nesuhi were pretty happy” about the deal, “Ahmet never got over that he had sold the company too soon and I think he blamed me for it for years. Quite frankly, I think they didn’t see what was happening as well as people like Clive Davis and Joe Smith and Mo Ostin and they sold themselves short. I think it was the confluence of the scandals and the problems they were having with the black acts but they sold for about as much money as they had. In net-out, it basically cost us nothing.”

  Telling a completely different version of his meeting with Sinatra in his autobiography, Wexler admitted that his never-ending anxiety about money was a major factor in bringing about the sale of Atlantic. After receiving his share of the purchase price, Wexler happily phoned an old friend from Washington Heights to inform him that Bennett Avenue “has its first millionaire.” Conceding the label had been sold for far less than it was worth and that if the partners had waited a year, they could have asked for twice as much, Wexler added, “I have no regrets. The sale meant comfort and security for the rest of my life.”

  Sadly for Wexler, this did not turn out to be true. As he would say forty years later, “My end of the buyout was $4 million. A million of that went to taxes. So I had $3 million. I divorced my first wife. Half of it went to her plus a couple of houses. How the hell did I exist thereafter? Ahmet stayed the course and was probably worth more than a hundred million by being there when all the good stuff came down. The dollar options. The Time Warner deal and AOL and this and that. Just by staying there.”

  The year after the partners sold to Warner-Seven Arts, Atlantic grossed $45 million. Ahmet and Wexler offered the new owners $40 million to buy their label back only to be turned down. Although Ahmet and Jerry Wexler were still running the store at Atlantic, they no longer owned it. And while Ahmet would thrive in the corporate world that was now the order of the day in the record business, the same could not be said for the man who had pushed hardest for the sale of Atlantic in the first place.

  FOURTEEN

  Helplessly Hoping

  “Jerry Wexler never liked Crosby, Stills & Nash because they wanted so much freaking artistic autonomy. While we were arguing about this, Wilson Pickett walks in the room and comes up to Jerry and says, ‘Jerry,’ and he goes, ‘Wham!’ And he puts a pistol on the table. He says, ‘If that motherfucker Tom Dowd walks into where I’m recording, I’m going to shoot him. And if you walk in, I’m going to shoot you.’ ‘Oh,’ Jerry said. ‘That’s okay, Wilson.’ Then he walked out. So I said, ‘You want to argue about artistic autonomy?’ ”

  —Ahmet Ertegun

  1

  In the spring of 1968, Stephen Stills, who was then keeping company with Judy Collins, for whom he had already written “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” accompanied the folksinger to a recording session in Greenwich Village. When she left the studio to have dinner, Stills told the engineer, “Here’s a hundred bucks. Will you just keep rolling? I’ve got these songs to put down.” Thirty-four years later, three ten-inch boxes marked “Steve Stills” containing the original quarter-inch tapes that had been rescued from a Dumpster in the studio’s parking lot found their way into Graham Nash’s hands.

  In Nash’s words, “It was nineteen songs Stephen had written between the end of the Springfield in May 1968 and the beginning of Crosby, Stills & Nash in August. Stephen tunes up and goes, ‘Helplessly Hoping.’ He comes to the end. ‘Change Partners.’ Comes to the end, retunes, and starts ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,’ which had never been put together and was still in three pieces. He did nineteen brilliant pieces of music that he’d written in four fucking months. That’s how focused and creative he was at that point in his life. He had the music. In spades.”

  Intent on pursuing rock stardom despite the breakup of the Springfield, the band Stills formed with David Crosby and Graham Nash, two seasoned music business veterans who had also left their original groups for different reasons, soon attained the kind of rarefied status only great Hollywood movie stars had known. At a time when the postwar baby boom generation was coming of age and the counterculture was in full bloom, Crosby, Stills & Nash came to represent the social and political concerns their adoring fans held most dear. Their debut album would eventually sell more than three million copies.

  A working-class boy from Blackpool, England, Graham Nash grew up in Manchester, where in 1963 he and his schoolmate Allan Clarke formed the Hollies. Named after Buddy Holly, the group had a series of harmony-driven pop hits in the United States. Nash had already begun looking to expand his musical horizons when he met the man who became his best friend and lifelong musical partner.

  Unlike Nash, David Van Cortlandt Crosby was a child of privilege who could trace his family lineage back to a surgeon who had served on George Washington’s staff during the Revolutionary War. His father, Floyd Crosby, was a brilliant cinematographer who won an Academy Award in 1931 for his work with documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty on Tabu and later shot High Noon, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 multiple Academy Award-winning western drama starring Gary Cooper.

  After graduating from the exclusive Cate School in Carpinteria, California, David Crosby dropped out of college to pursue a career in music and became a founding member of the Byrds with Jim McGuinn, Chris Hillman, and Gene Clark. The group had a number one hit in 1965 with its cover version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Crosby then cowrote “Eight Miles High” with Clark and McGuinn.

  At the Monterey Pop Festival in May 1967, Crosby angered McGuinn and Hillman by talking about politics between songs during the group’s set and then obliging his good friend Stills by taking Neil Young’s place in Buffalo Springfield when they performed. After Crosby clashed with McGuinn and Hillman during a subsequent recording session, they dismissed him from the band.

  A year later, Crosby and Stills sang with Nash for the first time at the singer Cass Elliot’s house in Los Angeles. As Nash would later say, “We all knew. There was no fucking question. David and Stephen and I would sing almost that whole first album with one acoustic guitar and kill people. It was obvious that this was something really new and fresh and unheard of before.” The producer Paul Rothchild then cut a two-song demo with the trio that he played for Ahmet. “In the middle of the first song,” Rothchild recalled, “Ahmet takes out the checkbook and says, ‘Fill in the number. I don’t care—whatever it is doesn’t matter.’ ”

  While Stills would later say all three musicians “were morally committed to Ahmet from the start” and that he “was really like the Mother Superior of this group,” the trio was not yet ready to sign a recording contract. Nonetheless, when Stills told Ahmet he wanted to go with Crosby to visit Nash in England so they could rehearse together but did not have the money to make the trip, Ahmet, in Nash’s words, “reached in his desk and gave him two thousand dollars.”

  As neither the group nor Stills had a manager, Ahmet instructed Stills to contact Robert Stigwood while he was in London. The Australian-born rock impresario, who had begun his show business career as a theatrical agent, was then running his own label, RSO Records, while also managing Cream, a band that had broken big for Ahmet in America after recording the album Disraeli Gears in four days in May 1967 at Atlantic in New York. Two practical jokers who shared an affinity for the high life, Ahmet and Stigwood soon became close friends as well as business partners.

  In Stigwood’s words, “Ahmet was giving me Stephen Stills to manage. Stills flew in from New York and came to my office in Brook Street and I said, ‘Nice to meet you. Let’s have dinner or something.’ And he said, ‘On the way here, I saw a Rolls-Royce in the window of a car shop and I liked it. Can you have it delivered for me tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Well, I think we should talk about whether we’re working together first.’ He said, ‘We’ve decided on
you. Ahmet said Stiggy would be good.’ I said, ‘That’s all well and good. But I’m not that good.’ I already had enough to contend with. One visit to my office and that was it.”

  After Crosby, Stills & Nash returned from London where they had played a tape of their music for George Harrison with a view to being signed by Apple only to have him turn them down, they went looking for a manager before seeking a record contract. As a band, their situation was complicated by the fact that although Crosby was no longer in the Byrds, the group itself was still under contract to Columbia. As a member of the Hollies, Nash was signed to Epic, a label distributed in America by Columbia. Stills, who was contractually bound to Atlantic, had already gone to Ahmet for money but apparently felt no obligation to return the favor by bringing him the band. Instead, he urged his band mates to allow David Geffen and his partner Elliot Roberts, who then managed Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, to represent them. Although Crosby said he never thought Geffen “was that nice a guy, and I didn’t trust him all the time,” he acceded to Stills’s wishes “because we were in the shark pool and we needed a shark.”

  Born in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn on February 21, 1943, David Geffen was seventeen years old when his father, a self-described Jewish intellectual who held a variety of jobs and became a Christian Scientist, died in Kings County Hospital. His mother, a Russian immigrant who had worked as a seamstress during the Depression, ran a bra and corset shop in Brooklyn and called her younger son “King David.”

  A starstruck kid who religiously went to neighborhood movie theaters and imagined himself onstage accepting an Academy Award while sitting in Radio City Music Hall, Geffen was a teenager when he read a biography of Louis B. Mayer. The storied head of MGM then became his idol. After graduating from New Utrecht High School, Geffen joined his older brother in Los Angeles. He then dropped out of Santa Monica City College, Brooklyn College, and the University of Texas before going to work as an usher at CBS Television City only to be fired for swinging at a man who cheered Art Linkletter’s announcement that he was going to do his show on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

  Determined to make a career in show business, Geffen passed himself off as a UCLA theater arts graduate and was hired to work in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency in New York. In a story that would become part of his show business legend, Geffen intercepted a letter from the university so his older brother could then write one attesting his résumé was accurate. In the mailroom, Geffen met his future partner Elliot Roberts, born Elliot Rabinowitz in the Bronx, and showed him how he had learned “the rudiments of deal making by studying memos and opening the mail.”

  Cutting corners and pulling moves that astonished even the most ambitious of his contemporaries, Geffen quickly rose through the ranks at William Morris and became a music agent, representing the Youngbloods and signing the Association. While managing the career of singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, he formed a close personal relationship with Clive Davis of Columbia, who became his first mentor in the record business. After Geffen played the Crosby, Stills and Nash demos for Davis, he assured Davis he would bring him the band as soon as he persuaded Atlantic to release Stills from his contract.

  Not knowing whom else to contact at the label, Geffen made an appointment to see Jerry Wexler in his office at 1841 Broadway. Making his pitch, Geffen explained that since Buffalo Springfield had broken up, he was really not asking all that much by requesting Stills’s release. While Wexler had never been a fan of the band’s music and had little use for what he liked to call the long-haired “rockoids” of whom Ahmet was so fond, he liked agents even less. Exploding into one of his characteristic rages, Wexler barked, “Get the fuck outta here!” Picking up the much smaller Geffen, Wexler threw him out of his office. When Geffen returned to his Central Park apartment, where Stills was eagerly waiting to hear what had happened at Atlantic, Geffen told him, “My God, they’re animals over there. We’ve got to get you out of there.”

  The next day, Wexler called Geffen to apologize for what he had done. Explaining he really had no right to be talking to him about this matter because Stills was Ahmet’s artist, Wexler arranged for Geffen to meet with Ahmet. Having already invested money in the band, Ahmet should have been infuriated by Stills’s decision to let Geffen go behind his back to try to sign them to another label. Far too skilled a diplomat to ever let his feelings interfere with what he already saw as a hugely profitable deal for Atlantic, Ahmet instead took a completely different tack.

  In Geffen’s words, their first meeting was “love at first sight . . . After an hour, he had me so completely charmed that there was nothing I wouldn’t have done for him . . . Our relationship began with him courting me. It was a seduction. He was a genius at it and I went for it hook, line, and sinker. This guy was treating me like I was the most important person in the world to him at that moment. I just thought he was the greatest thing since chocolate chip cookies.”

  After Ahmet had convinced Geffen “he was the better person for CS&N,” the manager hurried down to Black Rock, the CBS building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 52nd Street, where he told Clive Davis he had changed his mind and asked him to release Crosby and Nash from their contracts. Upset that Geffen had reneged on his promise to bring him the group, Davis refused to let them go. In Geffen’s words, “Clive said, ‘Absolutely no. We’ll have to work out some kind of compromise. For instance, I’ll take the first record, and they can have the subsequent records.’ I told Ahmet what Clive had proposed. Ahmet said, ‘Listen, I wouldn’t guarantee that these guys will be together to finish even a first record. Tell Clive I’ll take the first record, and then he can have all the rest.’ ”

  Even if Ahmet had not already wanted to sign Crosby, Stills & Nash, he now had yet another incentive to pursue the deal. As Bob Rolontz, the longtime head of publicity at Atlantic, would later say, “Ahmet knew how to play Clive. When he got an act that wasn’t quite right, he would spread the word that it was a great band and Clive would sign them for big money.” Adding fuel to the fire, the two men had by then already gone head to head for more than one act.

  After Moby Grape had told Ahmet they would sign with Atlantic because he had promised to work closely with them on their album, one of the members of the group called to tell him that because Davis had offered them twice as much money, the band had signed with him instead. They had however inserted a clause into their contract that would permit Ahmet to come into the studio and work with them as much as he liked.

  Knowing he had lost the band to Davis, Ahmet said he was very sorry to hear the news because he had intended to put out three singles at once when the album was released, something no record company had ever done before. A few months later, Ahmet was delighted to read in Billboard that the new Moby Grape album was coming out with three singles. As he would later say, “They made them do it. Which was one of the reasons that the record didn’t make it.”

  At the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, where the two record business moguls often found themselves watching one another as they did business from their respective poolside cabanas, Davis was talking to violinist David LaFlamme and two other members of the San Francisco band It’s a Beautiful Day whom he had just auditioned. As Ahmet walked by, he said, “Look, I don’t know who you are, but you are talking to the best in the business. You can’t do any better than to entrust your musical lives to him.” In his autobiography, Davis wrote, “The group was impressed and I was more than touched by this tribute.” That Ahmet had no interest in the band and wanted Davis to sign them seems never to have occurred to him, either at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool or when he wrote his book.

  In 1972 when Ahmet became convinced that Delaney Bramlett’s drug problems would prevent Delaney & Bonnie from ever achieving widespread commercial success, he sold them to Davis at Columbia for $600,000. Jerry Wexler would later say earning this much money from an act without producing an album was even more creative than making records.
The Delaney & Bonnie album on Columbia went nowhere.

  Ahmet was now competing with Clive Davis not only for Crosby, Stills & Nash but David Geffen as well. Able to size up people in an instant and use that knowledge to his own advantage, Ahmet had immediately understood that Geffen’s music business know-how, immense ambition, and deep-seated need for wealth and social prestige would make him an invaluable protégé. As Bob Rolontz would later say, “Ahmet stole Geffen away from Clive Davis.”

  Realizing Geffen had already decided to sign Crosby, Stills and Nash to Atlantic, Davis told him that in return for releasing Crosby and Nash from Columbia, he wanted Poco, a new band Atlantic had signed formed by Richie Furay of the Springfield and Jim Messina, the studio engineer who had replaced Bruce Palmer on bass. In itself, this demand was unprecedented in the record business. When Geffen relayed Davis’s offer, Ahmet said, “That’s pretty heavy,” and turned him down. After Geffen pleaded with him by saying, “Ahmet, you must do this for me,” he agreed to the deal.

  While Stephen Stills would later claim he said, “Ahmet, you gotta think like you’re a baseball team owner. We’re going to trade Richie Furay for Graham Nash,” the truth of the matter was that all on his own, Ahmet had won this one going away. In one fell swoop, he had swapped a band that would never make it as big for Crosby, Stills & Nash while also taking David Geffen away from Clive Davis. And while Geffen’s idol as a teenager had been Louis B. Mayer, he had just unwittingly cast himself as Irving Thalberg, Mayer’s second-in-command.