Once Zeppelin hit it big in America, Ahmet made it his business to form a close relationship with both Peter Grant and Jimmy Page. In the words of Lisa Robinson, the rock journalist who toured with Zeppelin throughout the 1970s, “Even though Robert Plant was the singer, the talker, the charmer, and more extroverted, it was initially Jimmy Page’s band—he put it together with the help of Peter Grant. Ahmet always knew where the power was and so his focus was always slightly more on Peter and Jimmy than Robert.”
Confirming that “in the beginning, it was all Jimmy,” Curbishley would later say, “Then gradually Plant established himself in terms of writing songs, helping with the melodies, and writing all the lyrics, and it became more of a partnership and a democracy and nobody understood that better than Ahmet. He had this ability to deal with the pair of them but as time went by, the divisions became deeper and he was struggling a bit in terms of trying to get them to record.”
At the start, in Phil Carson’s words, “Zeppelin was all about boys having fun with no darkness to it whatever and Peter Grant in some ways the ringleader.” The band soon acquired a reputation that became the gold standard for outrageous behavior on the road. Doing massive amounts of drugs and alcohol, the individual members of Led Zeppelin despoiled groupies as no band ever had before. In the words of Mario Medious, who began his career at Atlantic as an accountant only to transform himself into “The Big M,” a fast-talking FM promotion man, “Zeppelin had crazy hard-core groupies like the Plaster Casters who would give them head in a phone booth or at the dinner table. Guys in the band would say, ‘I just got plated, man.’ I didn’t know what plated was. ‘You were sitting at table, how could you get plated?’ ‘She plated me while I ate.’ ”
Becoming a devotee of Aleister Crowley, the occult philosopher, adventurer, and practitioner of black magic known as “the wickedest man in the world,” Page dabbled in Satanism. Emulating the man he called “a misunderstood genius,” the guitarist used some of his newfound wealth to purchase Boleskine House, Crowley’s former estate near Loch Ness in Scotland.
At the end of Zeppelin’s second American tour, drummer John Bonham, known for good reason as “The Beast,” attacked rock journalist Ellen Sander in the band’s dressing room and had to be pulled off her by Grant. In a backstage trailer at the Oakland Coliseum in 1977, Grant and the band’s huge bodyguard beat one of Bill Graham’s security guards so badly for supposedly having spoken rudely to Grant’s son that the promoter had both men arrested.
As Mario Medious, who endured thirty-seven one-nighters with Zeppelin on the band’s second American tour, would later say, “Ahmet and Peter Grant ended up being tight but they had fights all the time about money because Led Zeppelin innovated how bands got paid and controlled everything—what the album cover was like, everything. Grant was always complaining about something. That was why Atlantic sent me on the road with them. To cool him out.”
Despite their differences, in Curbishley’s words, “Ahmet had the talent to be able to talk to Peter Grant. He stood up to Peter and was not at all intimidated by him. Grant knew who Ahmet was and in the end, he owed Ahmet. It’s okay to come in with a great album and all that but you cannot minimize what Ahmet put behind that band.”
Whenever Led Zeppelin was on the road in America, Ahmet would appear in the band’s dressing room before a show. Welcomed by one and all as an honored guest, he would partake happily of whatever was going around and then fly with the band on its private plane to the next gig. As Jerry Wexler would later say, “Ahmet was the guy who went to the concerts and dealt with the managers. He plunged into it heart and soul. He became their friend and it was those efforts that made Atlantic a monster company.”
Spending little or no time with the band in the studio, neither Ahmet nor Wexler ever knew what kind of material Zeppelin was recording until the group actually submitted its new album. When the band delivered Led Zeppelin II in the fall of 1969, Wexler was forced to “throw out a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of records because the bass was so heavy and overmodulated that the needle skipped. We had to have it redone so it was playable.”
Two years after a shortened version of Zeppelin’s only single, “Whole Lotta Love,” became a Top Ten hit, the band released Led Zeppelin IV. Featuring “Stairway to Heaven,” the most frequently played song in the history of FM classic rock radio, the album eventually sold 23 million copies. Over the course of its career, Led Zeppelin sold more than 110 million albums in America and at least twice that all over the world.
Eleven years after first playing together in the basement of a record store on Gerrard Street in London, Led Zeppelin’s career came to an end. After consuming forty shots of vodka in a twenty-four-hour period, John Bonham asphyxiated on his own vomit and died in his sleep on September 25, 1980, at the age of thirty-two. “It all fell apart after Bonham died,” Curbishley recalled, “because Robert Plant felt they shouldn’t carry on. They tried with a couple of different drummers but it never really worked and so Robert went off to do a solo album.” When Ahmet decided in 1984 to record a collection of his favorite songs from the 1950s, he coproduced the Honeydrippers album with Robert Plant, and the singer’s version of Phil Phillips’s 1959 hit “Sea of Love” became his biggest-selling single.
Despite Curbishley’s continuing efforts to persuade Page and Plant to work together again, “Page was drinking a lot throughout that whole period and he used to close down. He was very insular. The bonding Plant was trying to achieve with him never really happened and it hasn’t happened as of today. However much I still urge Page to call Robert, go have some lunch, just hang out, he can’t do it. They’re two different animals. Totally different animals.”
The demise of Led Zeppelin also effectively ended Peter Grant’s role as the most feared manager in rock. “When Grant was really in a bad state,” Curbishley said, “Ahmet did a lot to shore him up and cover his ass. He went to see Grant in his house in England and sat down for twelve hours but Grant wouldn’t come out of the bedroom. Towards the end, it was quite insane and Ahmet never got that far with him because it all spiraled into madness.” Peter Grant died of a heart attack at the age of sixty on November 21, 1995. In Curbishley’s words, “The lifestyle destroyed him.”
Despite how much time he had spent on the road with Led Zeppelin and how close he had become with Grant, Ahmet never let himself be drawn into the vortex of madness that was the band’s stock-in-trade. Recalling his initial meeting with Ahmet in 1969, Robert Plant would say, “Right in the middle of the eye of the storm was this absolutely elite gentleman, the master of serenity, as much at home with the backstage cavorting of Led Zeppelin as he was with the politesse of high society. We had some memorable nights together; I wish I could remember them. He was, to me, an oasis and a model—how to be settled in the midst of all this madness, how to know when to get excited and when not. Of course, he’s been practicing for ages.”
FIFTEEN
Romancing the Stones
“It was ’69 or ’70, and I wasn’t aware that the Rolling Stones contract with London Records was running out . . . One morning there’s a knock on my bungalow door at the hotel where I’m staying, and it’s a British roadie who tells me that Mick says it’s OK if I want to come down to the studio where they are recording. I thank him very much, but I don’t go because I have something else I have to do that night. The next morning a knock on my door again, same roadie, he says, ‘Hey, listen, man. Mick wants you to come down,’ and the next night, I did. They gave me a tremendous reception, all the guys in the band. I leave the studio, and I go out with Bill Drake, who was a very powerful man in radio. He liked me because I drank with him. Well that night we drank a couple of bottles of whiskey together. I tell him I’ve been to the studio where the Stones are recording, and Mick Jagger says he wants to talk to me, and I have a plan to meet him at the Whisky at midnight. Drake says, ‘No kidding? Mick Jagger? Terrific.’ By this time I’m getting very tired from the jet lag I had the
day before and all the drinking. Anyway, we go to the Whisky. I’ve called ahead for a table, and Bill had a couple of girls, the four of us are sitting at the table, and I have another drink. Chuck Berry is onstage, and Mick arrives at twelve-thirty. I introduce him to Drake and the girls, and Mick sits down and starts telling me about their recording plans. He starts talking, and I doze off. I can remember this girl shaking me, going, ‘Wake up, wake up. It’s Mick Jagger. He’s telling you something important.’ Mick hates people who are into high pressure, but this was the opposite. Here he was telling me that the Rolling Stones have decided to sign with Atlantic, and I had fallen asleep.”
—Ahmet Ertegun
1
If only it had been this simple, Ahmet would not have spent the next eighteen months of his life working harder than he ever had before to convince Mick Jagger that the Rolling Stones did in fact belong on Atlantic Records. While the band would never earn nearly as much money for the label as Led Zeppelin, Ahmet saw the Stones as “the most desirable act in the business,” the jewel in the crown that would confirm beyond all doubt that Atlantic was the number one record company in the world.
Ahmet had first met the band on October 23, 1964, at photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s apartment at 333 Park Avenue South during a gala twenty-fourth birthday party for socialite Baby Jane Holzer. Two years later, Ahmet ran into Jagger again at a press party for Bobby Darin in London. In Ahmet’s words, “We had a few laughs at that time but then I lost contact with him. Not for any specific reason but then Mick called me up when the Stones’ contract with English Decca had about a year to go and they had decided to make a change.”
The dark side of the original British Invasion, the Rolling Stones’ distinctly dangerous onstage presence, sexually suggestive lyrics, and reputation for antisocial behavior caused them to be perceived in America as the antidote to the Beatles. It was not until “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” hit the top of the charts in 1965 that they achieved the superstar status in the U.S. they had already been accorded in England.
During the last week in October 1969 when Ahmet sat down with Jagger at the Whisky, the Stones were in Los Angeles preparing for their first American tour in three years. In July, Brian Jones, the founder of the group, had drowned in his swimming pool under mysterious circumstances shortly after having been asked to leave the band. The Stones had then performed with his replacement, ex-Bluesbreakers lead guitarist Mick Taylor, at a massive free concert in London’s Hyde Park.
After being busted for drug possession at an LSD party at Keith Richards’s country home in England in 1967, Jagger and Richards had been tried and convicted only to have their sentences overturned by a higher court. In the process, they had become counterculture heroes. With the Beatles no longer touring, the Stones were about to stake their claim in America as the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band.
After completing a very successful three-week, fifteen-city tour that featured three sold-out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the Stones flew into Atlanta on December 2, 1969. The band then journeyed to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where they recorded Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Got to Move,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Wild Horses.” Ahmet, who rarely spent time in what had become Jerry Wexler’s home studio, was there to greet them.
Looking incredibly serious and focused in an immaculate dark suit, white shirt, and tie, Ahmet can be seen in a photograph talking intently to Jagger. In full hippie mode, shaggy-haired Jagger sports a studded leather horse collar around his neck. On his head, he wears a top hat fashioned from a Union Jack. While the pair seem like ambassadors from two different worlds, they spoke a common language based on more than their shared love of the blues.
Despite having released fourteen albums and twenty-nine singles in America and England, the Stones were still essentially broke because of the disastrous management deals they had signed first with Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton and then Allen Klein. Jagger, who had attended the London School of Economics, was by then already on his way to becoming a consummate businessman who understood the inner workings of the record industry as well as Ahmet.
On December 6, 1969, as the Rolling Stones were performing at a huge free concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang who had been hired to provide security in return for cases of beer killed an eighteen-year-old black man named Meredith Hunter. Less than four months after the media had proclaimed the Woodstock Arts and Music Festival as the birth of the counterculture in America, the disastrous free concert at Altamont became its death knell. The event also served to increase the Stones’ notoriety in America by geometric proportions.
“Ahmet got involved with the Stones right after Altamont,” Peter Rudge, who managed the band’s next tour of America, would later say. “That was a crossroads for the Stones. They could have gone any way after that point but Ahmet’s courtship and signing of them took them from being one of the better rock bands to writing their own role in history. And Ahmet was embedded through all that behind the scenes.”
Despite the role Ahmet would eventually play in the Stones’ future, Mick Jagger was not about to allow the band to sign with Atlantic until he was certain no one could offer them a better deal. Bob Krasnow, the head of Blue Thumb Records in Los Angeles, was one of many record executives who did their best to convince Jagger that his label was the best fit for the Stones. As Krasnow would later say, “Mick and I were sitting in my office and I was pitching him like crazy and I said, ‘Look, man, the world is changing and we need to stick together in America to make sure the world changes for the best.’ I was probably stoned out of my mind and I got on one of my esoteric speeches and I fucked the whole thing up. I thought Mick had a social conscience. He said, ‘Hey, I’m a tourist here, man,’ and that was the last I ever heard from him.”
Krasnow also tried to forge an alliance to sign the band with Marshall Chess, who had become president of the label founded by his father and uncle only to leave the company after it was acquired by a conglomerate. Deciding it would be better if they remained friends rather than try to work together, Chess asked Krasnow for permission to contact Jagger on his own and Krasnow gave him the singer’s phone number in London.
Chess called Jagger in London and then flew there to meet with him only to be told the singer “was in Ireland writing when what he really had was some hot pussy there.” A few days later, the two men sat down to talk in Jagger’s living room. Jagger then took Chess to meet the rest of the Stones in their East London rehearsal room. Two weeks later, Chess received a telegram instructing him to come to London, where Prince Rupert Lowenstein, the merchant banker Jagger had asked to look into the band’s tangled finances, authorized the twenty-seven-year-old son of Leonard Chess to begin formal negotiations for a new record deal with the understanding that once the Stones had their own label, Marshall Chess would run it for them.
As Chess, who had known Ahmet since he and Jerry Wexler had attended his bar mitzvah in 1955, would later say, “We talked about numerous labels but the Stones wanted to be on Atlantic. That was by far our first choice because Mick and Keith wanted it and I loved Ahmet. But we did negotiate with two or three other majors, including Chris Blackwell at Island. But even before money was discussed, Atlantic was where they wanted to be.”
By this point, Ahmet had been courting the Stones so ardently that Jerry Greenberg, who was then just beginning his career at Atlantic as a promotion man, recalled, “I used to ask Jerry, ‘Where’s Ahmet?’ and he would always say, ‘With Mick.’ He followed Mick around for a year and maybe desperate is the wrong word but Ahmet wanted the Rolling Stones. Maybe because Jerry had signed Zeppelin. Maybe he wanted to have the biggest company in the world. Maybe because he loved Mick Jagger.”
On July 31, 1970, the contract Allen Klein had negotiated for the Stones with Decca Records expired. Jagger was still considering his options a month later when Ahmet and Elektra Records founder Jac Holzm
an sat down together at nine in the morning in the Oliver Messel Suite of the Dorchester Hotel in London to discuss their plans to record the upcoming Isle of Wight Festival. Ahmet, who had been out so late with Jagger the night before that his driver was asleep at the wheel of the company Rolls-Royce parked outside the hotel, called the singer to say what a wonderful time they’d had together, a point with which Jagger readily agreed.
Having already spent an enormous amount of time and money courting Jagger while also cultivating a “marvelous relationship” with Prince Rupert Lowenstein, “a terrific person who quickly learned all the devious ways of the music business,” Ahmet told Jagger the time had come for them all to sit down and make a deal. When Jagger said he would be happy to do so as soon as he had spoken with Clive Davis at Columbia, “all the color drained out of Ahmet’s face” and the call came to an abrupt end. In Holzman’s words, “Ahmet had this conversation with Mick and he was sort of bellying up to him about ‘Wasn’t that a wonderful time we had last night’ and then Mick said, ‘We’ll talk to you as soon as we talk to Clive Davis,’ and Ahmet was so obsessed he could not focus on our discussion.”
Fighting to control his anger, Ahmet picked up the phone and “very deliberately” dialed Jagger’s number. “Mick,” he said. “I can understand you want to talk to Clive Davis, and you should. But I want you to know I can only make one Stones-sized deal this year, and it’s either you”—and here Ahmet paused—“or Paul Revere and the Raiders.” He then hung up the phone. Thirty seconds later, the phone rang. Ahmet did not pick it up. Nor did he bother doing so as the phone rang constantly for the next forty-five minutes.
The Last Sultan Page 28
