The Last Sultan Page 26

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  Marijuana smoke filled the air as Ahmet and Jerry Wexler walked into Wally Heider’s Studio on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles where Crosby, Stills, and Nash had sometimes been doing as many as thirty takes of a song to get the vocals right while recording their debut album for Atlantic. As Phil Spector trailed in behind the partners, Stephen Stills immediately stopped what he was doing to greet Ahmet with a bear hug. “Yessir, we’re working hard,” David Crosby said. “At two bucks a minute, we can’t afford to socialize. We may even bring this one in on time, Ahmet. That’ll improve our reputation in the business a lot, right? ’Specially Stills.”

  As Stills guffawed, Ahmet affectionately ruffled the musician’s hair. Making a joke of his own, Wexler suggested the band call their album Music from Big Ego. When the idea was flatly rejected, Wexler mumbled, “Guess they don’t have the distance to appreciate it.” After meeting Ahmet for the first time in the studio, Graham Nash would later say, “This guy could make wallpaper turn around and look at him. Every time he walked into a room, it didn’t matter who else was there. Elvis could have been there and everyone would have been looking at Ahmet. It was very obvious when he walked into the room that this was a mighty, mighty presence.”

  After Ahmet, Wexler, and Spector left that night, the band spent nine hours cutting Crosby’s “Long Time Coming.” Everyone then went home except for Stills, who stayed behind until dawn working on a new arrangement that helped Crosby find himself as a lead vocalist. “At that point in his life,” Nash recalled, “Stephen was an incredibly focused person. Without question, he was the leader of this band and there was a reason we called him ‘Captain Many Hands.’ He played everything on that first album except drums and the guitar I played on ‘Lady of the Island’ and the guitar Crosby played on ‘Guinevere.’ ”

  In the words of Ellen Sander, a rock critic who was present during many of those sessions, “Everybody is driven in a different way but with Stephen, it was really kind of obvious. He couldn’t keep his hands off the board and he was driving the engineer crazy. He was just so consummately involved that he was with every single note every single minute. Stephen once said to me he realized what Buffalo Springfield had thrown away on the verge of what would have been an incredible run and he didn’t want to see this venture go amiss.”

  While there had been nothing but sweetness and light between the band and the partners at Atlantic in the studio, a set-to that occurred before the album was released should have served as an early warning that the balance of power in the record business had shifted. Because Crosby, Stills, and Nash viewed themselves as artists with a capital “A,” they would never be as easy to control as the acts with which the label had long since become accustomed to dealing.

  “Did you know that Tommy Dowd remixed our first record?” Nash would later say. “It’s not known and you know why? Because Crosby said, ‘If you ever touch our fucking music again, I will cut off your arms.’ I’m sure Ahmet must have had him do it but the point was—‘Don’t fuck with our music without us.’ ” When David Geffen finally played the completed album for Ahmet in New York, he excitedly exclaimed, “They’re going to be huge! They’re going to be huge!” but then added, “They’re not going to be as big as the Association.”

  After the Crosby, Stills & Nash album had been released to great critical acclaim and massive sales, the band was scheduled to perform in Chicago with Joni Mitchell opening for them and then at the Woodstock Arts and Music Festival. A protracted discussion soon began about finding another musician to join them onstage. “Absolutely, there was a conversation,” Nash recalled. “We recognized Stephen needed some kind of impetus to push him into a different realm. He could play great lead guitar on his own. But it was obvious that when he was competitive with someone, it went to a higher level. We considered Stevie Winwood. And Jimi Hendrix. I’m not kidding. Now, that would have been a band.”

  As it turned out, neither Winwood, Hendrix, nor Mark Naftalin, the keyboard player in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, was interested. David Geffen, Elliot Roberts, and Stills were having dinner with Ahmet in his Manhattan town house one night when he put on some old Buffalo Springfield albums and said, “We ought to add Neil to CSN. There’s something about Neil Young that goes with this.” Stills responded by saying, “But, Ahmet, he’s already quit on me twice. What do you think’s gonna happen this time?”

  Nonetheless, Ahmet’s idea made eminent sense to all concerned and when Roberts told Stills he would have to make the offer to Young himself, he did so. In Nash’s words, “Neil and Stephen’s relationship was pretty fiery at that point. They loved and hated each other. And they still do, to this day.” In return for joining his former Buffalo Springfield band mate, Young wanted his name on the group as well as an equal share of the money. After his request was granted, the band began touring as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and their “concert price skyrocketed.”

  Before Atlantic issued Déjà Vu, the group’s second album, a meeting concerning the cover took place in Ahmet’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Inspired by Stills’s great love for Civil War tintypes “and family journals of the 1860’s,” art director Gary Burden presented the partners with a cover featuring gold foil stamped lettering on “beautiful paper that was almost leather in feel and had a great bumped-up texture” made by “a family-operated paper mill in Georgia.” The band loved it. To that point in time, album covers had cost about nineteen cents apiece to manufacture. The one Burden presented would have cost sixty-nine cents.

  Emerging from the bathroom of the bungalow with his dark black hair bristling in every direction from his sleeveless undershirt, Jerry Wexler snapped, “Fucking artist appeasement! We could put it out in a brown paper bag and people would still buy it!” In the end, the band got its way and the cover was approved. Released in March 1970, Déjà Vu topped the charts and generated three hit singles.

  On May 15, 1970, Ahmet was with the group at the Record Plant in Los Angeles when they recorded “Ohio,” a song Neil Young had written after reading a Life magazine article about the killing of four Kent State students during an on-campus protest eleven days earlier. After taking the masters with him to New York, Ahmet released the song eight days later. Backed with Stills’s “Find the Cost of Freedom,” the record became a smash hit that overtook Nash’s “Teach Your Children” on the charts.

  As their fame mounted, the group became increasingly difficult to handle. When they played the Fillmore East in New York City in the spring of 1970, the playwright John Ford Noonan, then a member of the stage crew, called them “The Supremes.” To get the group to do an encore for their fans, promoter Bill Graham had to shove hundred-dollar bills under their dressing room door. Bidding farewell to the audience by saying he would see them in the street, Stills would then walk each night to his waiting limo so he could be driven back to his hotel.

  During their hugely successful 1970 summer tour, Stills so angered Neil Young at one show by hogging the spotlight that Young walked off stage and would not return for an encore. When the singer Rita Coolidge left Stills to be with Nash, the band broke up. At this point, even Ahmet believed Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were finally done.

  At dinner one night in New York with rock critic Ellen Sander and Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman, Ahmet sorrowfully shook his head and said, “That group is gone. The only way they’ll get back together again is for the others to go to Stills and ask him to come back and they’d never do it, they’re too proud and too hurt.” When Holzman suggested Ahmet could get someone just as famous and talented to replace Stills, Ahmet asked who that might be. “Paul McCartney,” Holzman replied. Without missing a beat, Ahmet said, “That’s a tremendous idea. Tremendous!” Lowering his voice, he added, “I wonder how much Apple would give me for the other three.”

  Once cocaine became the drug of choice in the rock scene, Stephen Stills became the subject of as many negative stories as have ever been told about any performer in th
e history of the music business. After CSNY’s live album 4 Way Street appeared in April 1971, David Geffen fired Stills as a client. Stills then printed bumper stickers that read, “Who is David Geffen and why is he saying those terrible things about me?”

  Beginning a series of melodramatic breakups and reunions worthy of a Spanish telenovela, the individual members of the group made their own successful solo albums, tried to record together again, and then scrapped that project as well. Maintaining his relationship with all four artists, Ahmet released Crosby’s solo album If I Could Remember My Name, Crosby and Nash’s successful debut effort, and Nash’s first two solo albums, Songs for Beginners and Wild Tales.

  Coming off stage one night during his 1973 “Tonight’s the Night” English tour, a “really drunk” Neil Young told Elliot Roberts that the set had gone so well he was going out for an encore. “Neil,” Roberts said, “do an encore to who? There’s no one here but Ahmet.” “Ahmet’s here?” Young asked. After being told he was sitting out front with a row of people, Young said, “All right! That’s who was applauding.” Walking back out onstage, Young did a three-song encore for him.

  In Nash’s words, “CSN signed with Atlantic for six albums. A record a year for six years. We’ve only just done six albums. My point is that Ahmet kept all those fuckers away from us. All those lawyers who said, ‘Hey, the contract says . . .’ And Ahmet would always be the one who said, ‘Hey, leave them alone. Whatever they do, we will take.’ No record guy ever got along better with his artists.”

  Which was not to say there were not also problems along the way. David Geffen was at a John Lennon recording session in Los Angeles in 1974 when he received an urgent call from Crosby. Screaming on the line, Crosby began calling his manager a crook and a thief and a motherfucker. Demanding to know how Crosby dared speak to him like that, Geffen hung up and then called Crosby’s business manager to say he had just gotten a horrible call from the musician. Laughing, the business manager explained that he had just done an audit on Atlantic Records only to learn Ahmet had charged all the trips on which he had invited Geffen to accompany him to Crosby and Nash’s joint royalty account. Calling Ahmet, Geffen, now furious himself, demanded to know how he could have done such a thing. Laughing, Ahmet replied, “What’s the problem? They found it? We’ll pay it.”

  Ahmet’s long-standing relationship with Stills ended a year later. Unable to get the musician into the studio to record with Young, Tom Dowd scolded Stills who then called Ahmet with his own version of what had transpired. Calling Dowd at home that night, Ahmet gave him hell only to have Dowd tell him he had no idea how out of control the sessions had become. The next day Ahmet walked into the studio at five P.M. Young came in and began working. In no condition to do the same, Stills straggled in later that night. The two men spoke. A week later, Stills was on Columbia.

  Twenty-two years later, during the week of the 1997 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, who then still owed Atlantic two albums, met with Ahmet and Val Azzoli, then the cochairman and co-CEO of the label, at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. Telling Ahmet they “loved him to death” and had “always respected him,” the musicians began, in Nash’s words, “complaining bitterly that nobody at Atlantic knew who we were, they had no respect for us, they were not working our stuff, and we wanted out of there.”

  Trying to pacify Crosby, Azzoli told the musician how much he loved having him on Atlantic and that he was family. “You fucking asshole!” Crosby replied. “I haven’t been on Atlantic Records for eight fucking years! Ahmet, are you fucking listening to this? This is what I fucking meant!” In Nash’s words, “That was the end of Atlantic with CSN. Ahmet let us go that day. That’s who he was.”

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  During the two-year period after Atlantic had been sold, Ahmet and Wexler continued to run the label as partners while setting off in distinctly different directions to pursue their own interests in a record business that was expanding more rapidly than ever. Heading south to studios in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Wexler returned to his roots and worked continuously, producing a variety of black artists whose music he loved and understood as well as anyone who ever lived.

  Determined not to get fooled again by what became known as the second British invasion, during the late 1960s, Ahmet zeroed in on London as the place where he could find and sign new talent that had not yet broken in America. Setting up shop in the luxurious seventh-floor suite in the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane designed by Oliver Messel where he always felt at home, Ahmet soon became a regular in the Scotch of St. James, the city’s hippest private club.

  His initial connection to the second flowering of the English music scene was Chris Blackwell. Born in London, Blackwell was a dedicated rhythm and blues devotee who had grown up in privileged circumstances in Jamaica before returning to England to attend the exclusive Harrow School. As a teenager, he would regularly come to New York to buy 78 RPM singles for 43 cents and then take them back to Jamaica, where he sold them for as much as £100 apiece to “the sound system” guys who played music and sold liquor at island parties.

  As Blackwell would later say, “The key thing was for me that if I came across an Atlantic record, I would pick it and if there was one I didn’t like, I would doubt my own taste because I had so much respect for the label because of the music they put out. That was something I wanted to emulate with Island Records. Where the label itself actually helped the act because if the act was on the label then the act must be interesting.”

  Twenty-two years old when he founded Island in Jamaica in 1959, Blackwell first met Ahmet a year later in New York. As Blackwell was trying to persuade Miriam Bienstock to allow him to distribute Atlantic records in Jamaica, Ahmet “popped his head in” to say he had already made such an arrangement with Byron Lee, who led the Dragonaires and owned the Dynamic Sound recording studio. Four years later when Little Millie Small had a smash hit for Island in England with “My Boy Lollipop,” Blackwell did a deal for her next record “for no advance with Atlantic instead of Columbia for a $50,000 advance, something I never made the mistake of doing again.”

  Once Ahmet began making regular visits to London, he and Blackwell started to spend time together “because we were kind of kindred spirits. He was basically my hero and sort of a father figure to me. A mentor in a way. Somebody I looked up to in every respect. He clearly loved the music, he loved the people, he was not just one-dimensional, he was an extraordinary person. I knew him quite a long time before I ever did any record deals with him and we had a social relationship whenever he came to London because Ahmet wanted to make Atlantic a rock label.”

  While Little Millie Small never did much business for Atlantic in America, Blackwell “thought the Spencer Davis Group would definitely succeed because they were trying to make American black music. But it wasn’t that successful. Atlantic had ‘Keep on Runnin’,’ which was the first big hit in England, and then I gave them the second one and they didn’t do that well with that one either.”

  Along with Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, Ahmet was sitting in the Scotch of St. James one night when “this little kid with red hair who looked about fourteen years old” took the stage with his group. In Stone’s words, “Stevie Winwood started playing and Ahmet jumped up and said, ‘Oh my God. Who is that, man?’ And I said, ‘Ahmet, you’ll never believe this. It’s your group.’ He said, ‘That’s the best news I ever heard in my life.’ ”

  A year after seeing Winwood for the first time, Ahmet threw a party at the Scotch of St. James for Wilson Pickett, who had just performed at the Astoria Theatre in Finsbury Park. Ahmet was standing at the bar in the club with his back to the stage when he heard someone playing guitar who “sounded like B. B. King.” As “there was no one in England who could play like that,” Ahmet looked over at Pickett and said, “Wilson, your guitarist sure can play the blues.” Pickett said, “My guitarist is having a drink at the bar.”

  Turning to the stage, Ahmet saw “this ki
d with an angelic face and his eyes closed, just playing, and I said, ‘My God, who is that?’ And that was Eric Clapton.” According to Ahmet, Robert Stigwood, who was standing next to him, said, “You really think he’s great?” Ahmet replied, “He’s fabulous. We have to sign him up right away.” In Ahmet’s words, “So Stigwood got with him, and that is how Cream was formed.” In truth, as Stigwood would later say, “I took over Eric when Cream was formed. Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker had been in the Graham Bond Organisation and then they wanted to form Cream and as I was already managing them, I was asked to manage the group.”

  Then twenty-one years old, Clapton had already attained cult status in England for his lead guitar work with the Yardbirds but was virtually unknown in America. Stigwood then signed Cream to his own label, RSO Records. While Ahmet would later claim he always knew Cream would make it in America, Stigwood would later say, “He wanted the Bee Gees but he actually wasn’t so keen on Cream. I played him their demo at Polydor in London and he said, ‘Oh, fabulous, fabulous. But not very commercial.’ That’s from the horse’s mouth and I don’t say this in any negative way. Part of Ahmet’s charm was that he was a great storyteller but he could really turn many corners in his story telling. I made him take Cream because I gave him the Bee Gees. And that is the absolute truth.”

  The Bee Gees were three teenage brothers from Australia who sounded so much like the Beatles that radio stations in America thought their first hit, “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” had been made by the Fab Four. When they came to America for the first time and were staying with Stigwood at the Plaza Hotel, Ahmet showed up at the hotel where he “pretended he was the porter and took their luggage downstairs. He carried their bags to the elevator. They knew who he was of course.” Stigwood returned the favor in London when Ahmet gave a party at the Dorchester to celebrate his new acts. “Just coincidentally,” Stigwood would later say, “they were all white acts. And he said to me, ‘You know, we’ve sort of become an all-white label.’ I got someone to call him pretending to be a journalist and say, ‘You’re having a party to celebrate your becoming a white label.’ He hardly ever forgave me.”