The Last Sultan Read online

  “We were very short on help,” Ahmet would later remember. “There was just Herb, Miriam, and me. Occasionally, if we had a particularly heavy box of records to send out, we would give one of the less successful heavyweight fighters a dollar to come and carry our shipment to the local post office.” In the words of Francine Wakschal, who began working at Atlantic in February 1949, “It was a funky neighborhood. When I went to work, there was a shipping clerk who used to come in early in the morning and wait for me so I could go into the lobby because there were always bums sleeping around. It was not a great building and the area was not good.”

  In time, the West Side of Manhattan from 42nd to 56th Streets between Broadway and Tenth Avenue would become the home of the independent record business in Manhattan with “dozens of small independent record labels and distributors eking out an unsteady existence in the burgeoning rhythm and blues field.” Tenth Avenue, which boasted the largest concentration of independents, most of which were located in storefronts, came to be known as “the Street of Hope.”

  By the time Ahmet and Herb Abramson set up shop not far from Madison Square Garden, then located at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue, Ike and Bess Berman were already doing business at Apollo Records. Herman Lubinsky, who knew nothing about music, had started Savoy Records from his electrical parts store in Newark. Syd Nathan had founded King Records in Cincinnati. In Los Angeles, Art Rupe, whose real name was Arthur Goldberg, was doing business at Speciality Records. Jules, Saul, Joe, and Lester Bihari, four brothers who had grown up in a large Hungarian Jewish family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were running Modern Records. Eddie and Leo Mesner were putting out hits on Aladdin. In Chicago, another set of brothers named Leonard and Phil Chess were converting the Aristocrat label into Chess Records. In an industry that was still relatively small, Ahmet and Herb Abramson had gotten in on the ground floor.

  Which did not mean Atlantic was yet doing all that well. In a fourteen-page letter on January 28, 1949, to his sister, “Dearest sweetest darling Selma,” Ahmet noted he was “working harder than I ever have. There is a lot at stake and I just have to make good. We started this record company at a time when business on the whole was on a downgrade and have done remarkably well, considering that fact. Of course, at first we were making no money at all, so I had to borrow quite a bit from Dr. Sabit in order to live in New York.”

  Hedging his bets in case the record business did not work out for him, Ahmet was also running a “patent development” company called Industrial Improvements for Dr. Sabit, who in return for a $6,000 investment had acquired a half-interest in some “sixty odd inventions” by a fellow Turk named Sukru Fenari. Although Fenari and Sabit would eventually be granted a patent for an automobile carburetor on which Ahmet had been “working very hard,” none of Fenari’s inventions had yet been sold and “getting the patents is a long tedious process, and of course all one does is spend money at first and that’s all we have been doing.”

  Each morning at about nine-thirty or ten, Ahmet would go to the Industrial Improvements office at 104 West 40th Street and then report to the new Atlantic office where he “usually had quite a few appointments.” Staying there until about seven at night, he would “return home, wash up and go out to dinner. After dinner, I often have to go to the opening night of one of our artists, or have to go hear some new talent. Sometimes we have recording sessions at night. Or else I have to go see some disc jockey.” After “paying for my laundry, food, and other necessities,” Ahmet didn’t “have a hell of a lot left to go out” and usually went “to bed by one o’clock so that I still get plenty of sleep.”

  In Ahmet’s estimation, “The record company is now worth about $25,000 and growing every day. We had some tough luck at first but we’re doing extremely well now, that is, we’re not getting rich yet but the company is now one of the top 25, and to do this in one year when there are some 500 companies is pretty good.” Ahmet, Herb, and Miriam Abramson were all drawing salaries “and we make a profit every month, and this increases solidly every month. But we keep investing all the money in order to let Atlantic grow healthily so that we may build something worthwhile for the future.” Within a year, Ahmet believed they could all “become quite well-to-do.”

  Although Atlantic had been unable to make any new records during the past year because of the musicians’ strike, it was now selling forty thousand records a month “and this figure is increasing. When we hit 75,000, then we’ll be able to take some sizeable profits out of the Atlantic Corporation, without it hurting the company.” As Ahmet noted, Atlantic already had “26 distributors in all parts of the U.S.A. and sell[s] more records in a month than a company like Nesuhi’s sells in a year. Our records are in almost all the shops.” Because his accountant and his lawyers had advised him not to declare any dividends, “This is why I don’t have any extra money now in large enough quantity to repay you the money I owe you, even though my share of Atlantic is worth quite a lot, but I would have to sell out to get it.”

  By running both companies for Dr. Sabit, Ahmet was taking home “$90.00 to $100.00 a week, on which I just manage to get along, as New York is tremendously expensive” but was now settled in a large four-room furnished apartment in a building with a doorman at 150 West 55th Street. Still living with his cousin Sadi Koylan, Ahmet had a “tremendous master bedroom with two double beds and a nice living room” in an apartment he shared with the “elderly couple” from whom he was subletting his two rooms. They were “extremely nice, well-bred Southern people and they like me very much, so that I’m really very happy and so are they to have me.”

  Just a week before he wrote the letter, Ahmet told his sister he and Herb Abramson had completed recording background music composed by Vernon Duke for This Is My Beloved, a collection of poems by Walter Benton. Although Miriam Abramson, who had first brought the project to Ahmet’s attention, thought the poetry itself was “absolutely schmaltz,” she believed it would “make a great record” because the book was so popular she had found it in a drugstore lending library where usually only romance novels and mysteries could be borrowed for 10 cents a day.

  Although Ahmet could not persuade “either Montgomery Clift, a new Hollywood star, or Tyrone Power” to participate in the project, he proceeded with it nonetheless. As he would later recall, “We made a recording of a book of poetry called This Is My Beloved by Walter Benton which was slightly erotic and the number one book that all the soldiers in the American army took with them when they went to war. We got this second-rate movie actor John Dall to read this poetry and I got Vernon Duke, who wrote ‘April in Paris,’ ‘Autumn in New York,’ ‘I Can’t Get Started with You,’ to write this semiclassical score, and that sold fairly well.”

  Released in March 1949, This Is My Beloved was the first 331/3 RPM album on Atlantic. Miriam Abramson would later recall that the record “did not sell particularly well” and this would seem to be confirmed by a letter written to Ahmet from Paris by Vernon Duke, a very elegant and eccentric character who had been born Vladimir Alexandrovitch Dukelsky in Russia. Addressing Ahmet as “Dear Ahmedakis,” Duke wondered why there had been no publicity for the record “in Variety, Newsweek, Life, Time, etc. . . . I am frankly astounded at the total lack of a single detail of the propaganda campaign in your letter. Not one clipping!”

  Whatever level of success Ahmet may have achieved with This Is My Beloved, he continued recording material no other independent record label would have even considered. Thinking that if Atlantic issued “a series of Shakespeare’s plays on record that hadn’t been done, every university would buy at least one copy,” Ahmet enlisted the well-known Shakespearean actors Eva Le Gallienne and Richard Waring to record Romeo and Juliet accompanied by “the music of Mendelssohn.” Ahmet’s belief that universities all across the country would snap up this release was “of course a mistake. They were not interested in buying any. We were very dismayed that this album of Shakespeare’s most famous play did not sell.”

  Ahmet and He
rb Abramson then released a series of children’s records that also did not sell. In order to survive, Atlantic needed a hit record. Establishing what would become the pattern of his career, Ahmet soon found one.

  4

  Once a week from his office, Ahmet would call his distributors to take orders for Atlantic’s records. After William B. Allen, his New Orleans distributor, had placed an order for thirty singles that retailed for 79 cents each, Ahmet plaintively asked him, “Can’t you push these a little more?” Telling Ahmet those were all he needed because no one in New Orleans was looking for anything on Atlantic, Allen said there was a record selling like crazy down there on both the Harlem and Cincinnati labels that no one could find. If he could locate some copies for him, Allen offered to take what Ahmet would later recall as either five or thirty thousand of them. Stunned by the size of the prospective order, Ahmet asked Allen to send him a copy of the record, “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” by Stick McGhee.

  Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 23, 1917, Granville “Stick” McGhee had acquired his nickname as a boy while pushing around his older brother, who suffered from polio as a child, in a wagon with a stick. In a photograph taken when both brothers were in their early thirties, they sit across from one another holding guitars before an ancient microphone. A handsome light-skinned man with a wispy mustache and a shiny lustrous conk, Stick peers down at his left hand as he fingers a G-seventh chord on his guitar. In an open-necked white shirt, a pair of boldly pinstriped dark suit pants held up by skinny black suspenders, white socks, and leather sandals, he looks like a gentleman who had little trouble attracting the ladies.

  Drafted into the army in 1942, McGhee first heard what was then a drinking song popular with black soldiers. In the song’s original chorus, the phrase “Drinkin’ wine motherfucker” was repeated numerous times. After he was discharged in 1947, McGhee cleaned up the lyrics, added some verses, and recorded the song with his guitar and a slap bass on the Harlem label for J. Mayo Williams, a pioneering black record producer who had been an outstanding athlete at Brown University, played in the National Football League, and then spent a decade running the “race music” department at Decca Records. Although Williams attached his name to the song as cowriter, he did little to promote the record, which nonetheless became a runaway hit in New Orleans.

  With no idea how to find thousands of copies of a record on a label he had never heard of, Ahmet decided to remake the song and then ship the Atlantic version to New Orleans and so began looking for someone to record it. As he would later say, “The only blues singers we knew were Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, but they were doing Carnegie Hall-type blues—more like folk singers, doing hollers and that sort of thing.” When Ahmet called Brownie McGhee to say he was looking for someone to cover “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” McGhee replied, “That’s my brother’s record!” After Ahmet asked if he knew how to get hold of him, McGhee said, “He’s right here.”

  When Stick McGhee came on the line, Ahmet asked him if he had ever signed anything when he had recorded the song. In an era when the independent record business was still so fly-by-night that such arrangements were common practice, Stick McGhee replied, “No man, I never signed anything. They gave me $75 and a couple of hot dogs.” Ahmet promptly offered him $500 to cut the song for Atlantic.

  Ahmet and Herb Abramson then spent twelve hours in the studio trying to get Stick McGhee to do an exact copy of the original record. Unable to get it right, they sent him home. When McGhee returned the next day, they cut the song in an hour. At the session on February 14, 1949, Ahmet and Abramson added Wilbert “Big Chief” Ellis on piano and Gene Ramey on bass and had Brownie McGhee sing backup vocals. Credited to “Stick McGhee & His Buddies,” the Atlantic track was far superior to the original version.

  Although the song was a twelve bar blues, Stick McGhee would, in Ahmet’s words, “sometimes sing 13 bars, sometimes eleven and a half, so it took us a long time but finally we got it right—and that was the first big hit we ever had. We sold at the time, I would say, 700,000 copies of ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,’ and the bootleggers sold a million.”

  Released in April 1949, the record went to number two on the Juke Box chart and number twenty-six on the Pop chart. Entering the Best Sellers chart on April 16, it remained there for twenty-three weeks. Even though Decca Records then bought the original from Mayo Williams and released it as well, the Atlantic version outsold the Decca side by far, which “gave us confidence in our production techniques and marketing.”

  A month after he had released the song on Atlantic, Ahmet went to Houston, Texas, to find a local distributor only to walk into a record store where he saw “a stack of about 300 copies of our record, ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,’ which lots of people were coming in and buying! I picked up a copy and it had the Atlantic logo and label, but it wasn’t our pressing.” In an era when “the police couldn’t have cared less,” it was also common practice for bootleggers to issue their own pressings of a hit record they would then sell for cash to anyone who would buy them.

  Determined to personally confront whoever had been stealing money from him and his company, Ahmet learned the men who had pressed the bootleg record were holed up in the mountains outside Paris, Texas, where they also made their own rye whiskey and bathtub gin. After being informed they kept five or six armed men on guard twenty-four hours a day, Ahmet decided his life was worth more than the money and did nothing to stop their operation.

  Despite how many illegal copies of Stick McGhee’s record may have been sold, Atlantic had its first hit. For independent record men like Ahmet and Herb Abramson, a hit was the high tide that floated all boats. Above all else, a hit allowed a record man to stay in business so he could produce more hits. The only problem was that once a record man made a hit, he had to make another, if only to get the distributors to pay what they owed for the first one. The need to generate hits would soon become Ahmet’s lifelong addiction.

  Along with the money “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” brought Atlantic, the success gave Ahmet credibility. No longer just a rich boy dabbling in a business in which he had learned there were no rules, everyone stole, cheated, and lied, and making hits was all that really mattered, Ahmet had himself now become an authentic record man.

  FOUR

  The House That Ruth Built

  “Ahmet was eyeing up good musicians all the time, and they could see he knew a lot about the blues. So the only way he was able to sign artists was by becoming friendly with them, ’cause he sure couldn’t give them more money or even as much as most of the other companies because he didn’t have it in those days. So it was due to personal contact and through friendship . . . It was really through a personal relationship. Ahmet’s ‘personal touch’ extended to some artists he’d never met. For instance, one night he was in Washington, this would be in the late 40’s, forty nine or so, he went to a club and there was an unknown girl singing, it was Ruth Brown. Immediately he said, ‘Look I just started a company called Atlantic and I’d like to record you.’ She’d never received a recording offer before, she was very young, she said fine, great, and they made a deal right there and then in a small club in Washington. Anyway, she was involved in a bad car accident on her way to New York to record, and Ahmet took care of her, made sure she was okay before she eventually recorded in New York, and she became very big.”

  —Nesuhi Ertegun

  1

  Both Ahmet and Herb Abramson knew the next step in building Atlantic was to find, sign, and then develop an artist who would give the label staying power in the marketplace. Much like the motion picture industry in Hollywood, the record business had always been all about stars and the best way to ensure a label’s enduring success was to have as many of them under contract as possible. Atlantic’s first great star was Ruth Brown. Although even she never seems to have known who created the phrase, the label became known in its early days as “The House That Ruth Built,” a play on the well-known
nickname for Yankee Stadium.

  Between 1949 and 1961, Brown cut nearly one hundred sides for the label. Five of her records went to number one on the rhythm and blues charts. Eight more made it to the Top Ten. Onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1955, Ahmet and Abramson presented the singer with a plaque to commemorate the sale of five million of her records. When Ruth Brown joined the label in 1948, Atlantic was ranked twenty-fifth in the R&B field. By 1951, in her words, “and from then on, Atlantic was the undisputed number one.”

  Ahmet would later describe the relationship between a record label and an artist as being very much like marriage. While there was always a great deal of excitement at the beginning and that went on for a while, it did not last forever. Eventually, the artist would leave to record for a richer company or the label would find someone younger and the two would part company, often not on the best of terms. In every sense, this was the nature of the relationship between Ruth Brown and Atlantic.

  The daughter of a dockhand who directed the local church choir, Ruth Brown was born Ruth Weston on January 30, 1928, in Portsmouth, Virginia. Inspired by Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington, she began singing at USO shows and in local nightclubs. At the age of seventeen, she ran away from home with trumpeter Jimmy Brown, whom she then married.

  By the time Ruth Brown joined the Lucky Millinder Orchestra as their second female vocalist in 1948, the band was playing hard-driving rhythm and blues powered by saxophonists Clarence “Bull Moose” Jackson and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. After spending a month on the road with the band, Brown performed for the first time on July 4 at Turner’s Arena, a two-thousand-seat venue in Washington, D.C.

  As the singer was signing autographs after the opening set, one of the saxophone players asked her to bring the band some sodas. After she handed them to her fellow musicians, Millinder came to the edge of the stage and told her, “I hired a singer, not a waitress. You’re fired! And besides, you don’t sing too good anyway.” Twenty years old, Brown found herself stranded without any money in the nation’s capital. She then, in her words, “got a job at a little club called the Crystal Cavern on 11th and U Street.”