While flying together to Paris, Stigwood and Ahmet’s good friend Earl McGrath managed to get their hands on Ahmet’s passport “and put an indecent photograph over his face and he presented it to customs.” On a business trip to Tokyo where the three men shared a suite, Ahmet and McGrath came into Stigwood’s bedroom and threw a bucket of water on him. Stark naked, Stigwood ran across the lounge only to be greeted by a delegation of Japanese senior management recording executives who had come to say goodbye to him. “It was all, ‘Good morning, Mister Stigwood. Good morning.’ They didn’t really bat an eye lid.” And then there was the evening in Los Angeles when Ahmet told Stigwood he was giving a black-tie party for him. Dressed to the nines, Ahmet had his driver take them both to a parking lot where he had paid a collection of seedy derelicts to greet them.
While Stigwood had a well-earned reputation as one of the hardest bargainers in the business, he and Ahmet recognized one another as fellow empire builders and never let their egos get in the way when working together to build an act or sell an album in which they both had a sizable financial stake. To promote “I Feel Free,” Cream’s first single on Atco in America, Ahmet persuaded Stigwood to fly the band to New York to appear at Murray the K’s 1967 Easter show at the RKO Theater on 58th Street. Also featuring The Who, whose next appearance in America was at the Monterey Pop Festival, the show was headlined on alternate nights by Wilson Pickett and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.
On the day after the 1967 Easter Sunday Be-In in Central Park, Eric Clapton went to the Atlantic studios, where he met Ahmet and Nesuhi for the first time and cut “Lawdy Mama,” a song he had first heard Buddy Guy and Junior Wells do on Hoodoo Man Blues. In May, Cream flew back into New York on a Thursday night to record their second album. Before they arrived, Ahmet told Tom Dowd the band had to leave the country on a seven o’clock flight on Sunday night because that was when their visas would expire. In four days with Dowd at the board and Felix Pappalardi producing, Cream transformed “Lawdy Mama” into “Strange Brew.” With lyrics by the English poet Pete Brown, Disraeli Gears (an English roadie’s mistaken pronunciation of the derailleur gears on a racing bicycle that Clapton seized upon for the album title) also featured “Tales of Brave Ulysses” as well as the song that became the album’s monster hit, “Sunshine of Your Love.”
Photographer Don Paulsen, who was present during those sessions, would later say he was “utterly amazed at the degree of input” Ahmet had “in terms of choice of song, tempo, arrangement” with “musicians, who clearly had so much talent but who were equally so genuinely looking to him for guidance.” Having already decided Cream should be Clapton’s band, Ahmet pushed for him rather than Jack Bruce to do most of the singing only to relent when it became apparent to him the bass player was in fact the real leader of the group.
Unable to get Cream airplay in the U.K., Stigwood subsidized the group for a year until they finally broke big on the West Coast after a week-long engagement at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, where they were forced to begin improvising so they could expand their song list to fill two sets a night. While flying together to London, Ahmet, in Stigwood’s words, “dropped a nugget of information to me that Cream and the Bee Gees were 50 percent of his album income at that time.”
Unlike the Bee Gees, who would continue working together throughout their lives, Cream soon began to implode. “Basically, they didn’t like each other,” Stigwood explained. “On their third tour of America, there were rows and fighting every night. Ginger was going to murder Jack. Jack was going to commit suicide. And Eric was dying and saying, ‘Get me out of here. I hate the two of them.’ ”
After Cream released Wheels of Fire, a double album with one live disc and the other a new studio recording that was roundly slammed by critics, Stigwood realized he could no longer keep the group together. Fed up with the drudgery of being out on the road with three musicians who drove audiences wild onstage but could not stand to be in the same room together, Stigwood came up with the idea for the band to do a 1968 farewell tour of the United States followed by two final concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
“Cream was breaking up and Ahmet wanted one more album and they said we hate one another and did not want to do it,” Phil Spector would later tell Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner, “and Ahmet said, ‘Oh no, man, you have to do one more for me. Jerry Wexler has cancer, and he’s dyin’ and he wants to hear one more album from you.’ They go in and make the album and Ahmet says, ‘Jerry Wexler isn’t dyin’, he’s much better, he’s improved.’ ”
During their three years together as a band, Cream sold fifteen million records for Atlantic in America and Ahmet began what became his lifelong friendship with Clapton. After Tom Dowd expressed concern about how much heroin and cocaine the guitarist was using during the recording of Layla with Derek and the Dominos in 1970, Ahmet flew to Miami to see him. Taking Clapton aside, Ahmet talked about Ray Charles and how painful it had been for him to see Charles get caught up in the world of hard drugs. Becoming so emotional he began to cry at one point, Ahmet did all he could to persuade Clapton to deal with his problems but the guitarist continued his descent into hard-core addiction.
By then, Clapton had already formed and walked away from another short-lived supergroup. Just nine weeks after Cream had played its final shows at the end of 1968, the guitarist began jamming in the basement of his home in Surrey with his good friend Steve Winwood, who was then at loose ends during what proved to be a temporary breakup of Traffic, and the two decided to form a band. After Winwood persuaded Clapton to let Ginger Baker join them, they added Family bassist and violin player Ric Grech to the lineup.
With Robert Stigwood and Chris Blackwell working together to smooth out the contractual hassles, the new group made its debut on June 7, 1969, at a massive free concert in London’s Hyde Park. In Stigwood’s words, “We were going to do this free concert in Hyde Park and I was operating on blind faith and that was how they acquired the name. You had to get a council license to appear in Hyde Park and so I applied for ‘Blind Faith.’ I made the name up for the concert and that was it.”
Five weeks later, Blind Faith began touring America in support of an album that would sell half a million copies in a few months. On July 12, as the band was performing at a sold-out Madison Square Garden in New York, Ahmet sat down for an extraordinary dinner meeting in a private room at “21” with Steve Ross and Ted Ashley, the cofounder of the Ashley-Famous Talent Agency. Born Theodore Assofsky in Brooklyn, Ashley had suggested that Ross acquire the Warner Brothers-Seven Arts corporation for $400 million. The deal, which gave Ross full control of Atlantic Records, had been announced just three days earlier.
Ross, whose birth name was Steven Jay Rechnitz, was the son of Jewish immigrants who settled in Brooklyn. After marrying the daughter of a Manhattan funeral parlor owner, he became the head of his father-in-law’s company and used a bank loan to start a successful rental car agency, which he then merged with Kinney Garage, a firm that owned and operated parking lots, to form Kinney National. The company went public in 1962 with a market value of $12.5 million, and Ross then began acquiring a variety of other companies. After he purchased the Ashley-Famous agency for $13 million in November 1967, Ross and Ashley set their sights on a major show business acquisition. Their successful bid for Warner Brothers-Seven Arts was based primarily on the earnings of the company’s very profitable record labels, Warner-Reprise and Atlantic.
When Ahmet learned of the acquisition, he let it be known he would be leaving Atlantic as soon as his two-year management contract ran out. To prevent this from happening, Ashley set up the dinner at “21” where the three men spent six hours discussing Ahmet’s future at the label. At 12:45 in the morning, Ahmet tried to show Ross how little he really knew about the record business by saying, “Look, I’ve got a new group, Blind Faith . . .”
“You mean the guys from the Old Cream and Stevie Winwood, and they just sold out Madison S
quare Garden without selling a record?” Ross replied. As Ross would later tell the story, Ahmet excitedly leaped to his feet, said, “Yeah, man, you got it!” and then agreed to stay on at Atlantic. While Ross liked Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, he had no idea “who or what Joni Mitchell was” and had been given this vital bit of information the day before by a friend who was a Wall Street entertainment analyst.
For Ahmet, the fact that Ross had gone to the trouble to find out about Blind Faith and then tried to impress him with the knowledge was what poker players call “a tell.” It was a sign Ross knew he could never replace Ahmet and would allow him to continue running Atlantic Records on his own terms. For Ahmet, the truly decisive moment came when Ross pleaded, “Give us a chance,” and then assured Ahmet he would do everything in his power to keep him happy. Ross himself would later call it one of the luckiest days of his life. And so it was that three superstar musicians who made only one record and were soon so at odds with one another that they began traveling to gigs in separate limousines helped shape the future not only of Atlantic but the entire record business as well.
By October 1969, Blind Faith was history. That Steve Ross could never have handled the rock ’n’ roll histrionics Ahmet had already learned to deal with on a daily basis was best illustrated by a story Ahmet loved to tell about what happened after the end of the band’s first and only tour of America. To recover from the grueling ordeal of being out on the road with Blind Faith, Ginger Baker decided to spend a month in Jamaica. Robert Stigwood called Ahmet from London to say that Baker, who owned an Aston Martin in England, wanted to rent one on the island.
Since no one in Jamaica, in Ahmet’s words, “particularly knew what an Aston Martin was,” Ahmet told Stigwood even he could not help him. Nonetheless, Ahmet got in touch with Chris Blackwell, whose cousin arranged for a friend who owned a Ferrari to let Baker drive the car for a month, provided Ahmet would pay for any damages, which he agreed to do. A few nights later, Ahmet “got a call in the middle of the night from Ginger Baker who was ranting and raving, screaming down the phone at me . . . ‘I don’t want a fucking wop car!’ ”
Politely, Ahmet explained there were no other cars of this kind to rent in Jamaica but “he just kept yelling and screaming at me down the phone.” Calling Stigwood in London, Ahmet said they might as well ship Baker his car from London. “So they put the car on the plane and sent it to Jamaica but somehow the shipment got lost and then we had to trace it. It landed in Atlanta instead of Jamaica and finally the car got to Jamaica two days before he was leaving. He was furious.”
The first time Ahmet had ever met the “hotheaded” drummer, Baker had told him, “I’m a communist. You understand? You keep that in mind, and you’ll understand a lot about the way I behave.” When Ahmet next saw Baker, the musician apologized for his behavior in Jamaica. “Well, that’s okay,” Ahmet said. “I kept one thing in mind that you told me some time ago and I didn’t get angry.” When Baker asked what that was, Ahmet replied, “Remember you told me you were a communist? I just kept that in mind.”
While this was the punch line Ahmet always used when he told the story, Jac Holzman would later say the car Baker had wanted in Jamaica was in fact a Jensen Interceptor and that when Sheldon Vogel, who handled the finances at Atlantic, brought Ahmet a check for $10,000 to cover its shipping costs to Jamaica, Ahmet said, “Sheldon, just because I asked for the check doesn’t mean you should bring it to me.” As Holzman would later say, “That’s the real end of the story. He didn’t want to give the money to Ginger at all.”
4
Despite Ahmet’s deep connection to the music scene in London, it was Jerry Wexler who signed the English band that went on to sell the most records for Atlantic. Wexler had first met “Little” Jimmy Page when Bert Berns brought the guitarist to New York to play on R&B sessions. In the fall of 1968, along with Tom Dowd and the brilliant arranger Arif Mardin, Wexler was producing Dusty Springfield’s iconic Dusty in Memphis album when the English pop singer told him Page was forming a band in London known as the New Yardbirds.
While Wexler remembered Page had “played his ass off” while recording for Berns and also knew John Bonham, another member of the new group, was “a hell of a drummer,” he had never heard of lead singer Robert Plant. Based solely on Dusty Springfield’s recommendation, Wexler decided to pursue them. That both Clive Davis and Mo Ostin were also trying to sign the band only served to increase Wexler’s interest and he arranged to meet with their manager in New York.
Bringing with him from London the tapes of what would become the band’s first album, Peter Grant sat down with Wexler in his office at Atlantic. A hulking giant of a man who stood well over six feet tall and weighed more than 250 pounds, Grant sported a fierce horseshoe mustache that along with his prodigious gut made him look like the villainous professional wrestler he had once been. Stealing a beat on the competition, Wexler offered Grant a $75,000 advance as well as a five-year recording contract that the manager quickly accepted.
The band’s American lawyer then called Wexler to say he could have the world rights for another $35,000. Asking the lawyer to let him think about it, Wexler offered the English rights to Roland Rennie, the head of Polydor Records, for $20,000 only to have him pass. In what turned out to be one of the best deals in the history of the record business, Wexler bought the world rights for $35,000.
Much like Ahmet, who no longer had to worry about how much it would cost to sign a new act, Wexler made the deal because the money was not coming out of his pocket. By then, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, John Paul Jones, and Robert Plant had decided to call themselves Led Zeppelin, a name Page had come up with while trying to persuade guitarist Jeff Beck as well as The Who’s bassist John Entwhistle and drummer Keith Moon to join him only to have Entwhistle say the aggregation might go down like a “lead zeppelin,” a term he used to describe a bad show. Grant then suggested Page omit the “a” in “Lead” so “thick Americans” would not pronounce it “Leed.”
On November 23, 1968, Atlantic issued a press release announcing that while “the exact terms of the deal are secret,” the label had signed “the hot new English group, Led Zeppelin” to “one of the most substantial deals Atlantic has ever made.” As the release also noted, “Top English and American rock musicians who have heard the tracks have called Led Zeppelin the next group to reach heights achieved by Cream and Hendrix.”
Unbeknownst to Wexler, Chris Blackwell had already “shaken hands with Peter Grant on Zeppelin for $25,000 an album for the world excluding America and Canada.” As Blackwell recalled, “It was a handshake deal but I was dealing with Peter Grant and so it wasn’t a deal until it really was a deal. And to tell you the truth, I’m glad I didn’t get them because it wouldn’t have worked for us at Island. Too dark. I couldn’t have dealt with it.”
At a time in the record business when every manager personified the act they represented, Grant had already acquired a reputation as a fearsome figure who would stop at nothing to protect his artists. “I signed Led Zeppelin,” Wexler would later say, “and then I had nothing to do with them. Absolutely nothing. Ahmet took over their care and cleaning. I don’t think I could have tolerated them. I got along fine with Peter Grant. But I knew he was an animal.”
To say that Ahmet and Peter Grant had virtually nothing in common except for Led Zeppelin would be a major understatement. Before forsaking his studies at the age of thirteen to become a sheet metal worker, Grant had attended the Ingram Road School in southeast London. As Phil Carson, who played bass with Dusty Springfield before becoming Atlantic’s label manager in England and then the manager of Yes, recalled, “I went to St. Joseph’s College which was not five miles from the Ingram Road School where Peter Grant went. His school was real working-class and the Kray brothers [notorious English criminals] had gone there. Peter Grant was like them although he never did get involved in any crime.”
When Carson was eleven years old, he witnessed a fight between the St. Jos
eph’s College rugby team and “the Ingram Road boys. The entire first fifteen showed up, two or three years older than the nine or ten Ingram Road boys, and they got fucking slaughtered. Grant was in the fight and they came fully armed with sawed-off billiard cues which was not exactly the Queensbury rules and they just beat the shit out of the St. Joseph’s college fifteen. It was incredible.”
After doing his national service, Grant became a doorman and bouncer at a coffee bar where pop sensations Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, and Tommy Steele got their start. At the suggestion of the Australian-born professional wrestler who co-owned the coffee bar, Grant began wrestling on television in England and then became a bit-part actor, stuntman, and body double in movies and television. Turning his attention to the music business, Grant quickly became the most physically imposing and dangerously explosive manager in rock. After Grant had taken the Yardbirds on their final tour of America, Jimmy Page chose him to manage Zeppelin.
Fifteen days before their first album was released, the band was already on tour in the United States, making their American debut in Denver on December 26, 1968. A smash hit, Led Zeppelin soon hit the Top Ten, where it remained for the next seventy-three weeks, eventually selling eight million copies in America. Hailed as the inventors of heavy metal music, Zeppelin played electric blues infused with elements of folk and Celtic music in a manner no one had ever heard before.
As Bill Curbishley, The Who’s long-term manager who also guided the solo careers of Page and Robert Plant, would later say, “Having worked with all these musicians, the difference between The Who and Led Zeppelin was that The Who never gave a bad show. They were always either good or absolutely amazing. Whereas Zeppelin were either awful or absolutely brilliantly amazing. There was no in-between. It had a lot to do with whatever condition they were in when they went onstage. It was also a different dynamic. Zeppelin was really about sex and The Who was more about intellectual frustration and aggression.”
The Last Sultan Page 27
