As Holzman would later say, “I have no idea what Paul Revere and the Raiders were doing then but the point was that by picking them, he was fucking with Mick’s head and yanking his chain. If he had picked a contemporary artist, Mick might have believed it.” But then as Holzman would later write, “Ahmet was the greatest poker player in the business.”
Rupert Lowenstein then contacted Clive Davis. When Davis spoke to Jagger over the phone, he told him his style was different from Ahmet’s and that while he sometimes traveled, he could not spend a lot of time socializing with him. Jagger said his decision was strictly business and would not be based on social considerations. Because he knew “Columbia was the best company in the business” and was also well aware of Davis’s reputation, Jagger encouraged Davis to make a bid for the Stones but told him to talk to Lowenstein about the actual numbers.
According to Davis, Lowenstein then told him the Stones wanted an advance of between $5 and $6 million (most likely over the length of a contract for five or six albums) as well as “a staggering royalty rate.” As the band was then selling between 750,000 and a million units per album, less than half of what Columbia artists Chicago, Santana, and Blood, Sweat & Tears were selling and nowhere near Simon and Garfunkel’s massive sales, Davis feared that if he paid the Stones what they were asking, it would cost him an unimaginable sum of money to retain his more successful acts when their contracts came up for renewal.
Deciding the stakes were too high for him, Davis opted not to meet the Stones’ demands. Davis may have also known that with Ahmet in the game, he stood no real chance of signing the group but was only being used to help push up the final price. As Stones lead guitarist Keith Richards would later say, “I think we were fishing but at the same time, the idea of Atlantic Records loomed large on our English horizon. Just the idea of being on Atlantic blew us away. We’d already died and gone to heaven, man. I didn’t really warm up to Clive too much but I was attracted to Atlantic because of their knowledge of black music and how they knew how to record. Ahmet was chasing Mick but that was the obvious tail to chase, right? I was quite willing to let Mick carry on and do the main business but I think we were both saying, ‘Atlantic Records sounds right to us.’ ”
Ahmet knew the band was leaning toward signing with him but Clive Davis’s entry into the race only served to up the ante. As Ahmet would later say, “Whenever I saw Rupert or Mick with someone else, my heart sank. It was a painful, ecstatic courtship.” Increasing his already dogged pursuit of the Stones, Ahmet arranged one of the more surreal high-level record business meetings of all time. Bringing Lowenstein and Marshall Chess together with Steve Ross at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Ahmet stood with them in the shallow end of the hotel pool explaining just how much he could do for the Stones with Ross’s backing if the band signed with Atlantic.
Along with Atlantic lawyer Mike Mayer and Sheldon Vogel, the label’s chief financial officer, Ahmet then sat down with Chess, Lowenstein, and their lawyer to hammer out the fine points of the deal in the conference room at the Atlantic Records office on 61st Street and Broadway in New York. As Chess would later say, “I felt I knew more than Ahmet about what it cost to press a record and how much profit was in it because we had pressed everything ourselves at Chess. We got a dollar an album from Atlantic which was the biggest deal ever at that time and a million-dollar advance. Which would be like five million today. Ahmet was patting his head with his white Sulka handkerchief because he was shvitzing when I said, ‘It costs eighteen cents to press a record. Give me a fucking break.’ It was not easy but the deal went down in two days and I was thrilled.”
On April 1, 1971, a year and a half after Ahmet had fallen asleep on Mick Jagger in the Whisky, the Rolling Stones signed with Atlantic. The monster deal Marshall Chess had cut in New York led to the creation of Rolling Stones Records and guaranteed the band an advance of a million dollars per album for five albums against a royalty rate of more than 10 percent a record. As Ahmet would later say, “I think Jagger would have liked to be on a funky label. I think Jagger would have liked to be on Excello. We were the closest he could get to Excello and still get five million dollars.” A huge deal by any standard that no other label was willing to match, it was also a contract Ahmet would have never signed if he had been spending his own money.
Quickly, Ahmet assumed the same role with the Stones he had already played over the years with other great Atlantic artists whose music he instinctively understood. Andy Johns, who was then twenty years old and just beginning his career as a recording engineer with the band, first met Ahmet at Olympic Studios in London. As Johns was mixing “Bitch,” a track from the Stones’ debut album on Atlantic, “a very suave old guy I didn’t know came in. It was Ahmet, who had probably just had his hair cut in France and lunch in Budapest.”
Sitting down at the back of the control room, Ahmet watched in silence for a while as Johns, in his words, “was struggling a bit with the mix. Then he said, ‘Hey, kid! What you oughta do is add a little bottom to the guitars and turn the bass up.’ He was a bit of an authority figure so I did what he said. Bingo! The thing jelled. He got up and wandered off and I said to Keith, ‘Who the fuck is that?’ Keith said, ‘You don’t know who that is? That’s Ahmet Er-te-gun! And he’s been making hit records since before you were born.’ The reason the Stones signed with Atlantic was because they were so impressed with Ahmet. He could hang out with a prime minister in the morning and do blow with the fucking bass player in the evening.”
Having grown up in England listening to Chuck Berry on Chess as well as Ray Charles and Ruth Brown on Atlantic, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards now had their own label headed by Leonard Chess’s son that would be distributed by the man who had recorded so many of the artists they idolized. That the Stones had done the right thing by deciding to go with Atlantic was confirmed when Ahmet visited Jagger after the deal had finally been signed. As Jagger would later say, “It was in my house in London and he’d drunk so much bourbon that when we actually shook hands on the deal, the chair fell back and he fell on the floor.” In what seemed to all concerned like a record business marriage made in heaven, the honeymoon was about to begin.
2
When it came to celebrating good fortune, most especially where his new darlings the Rolling Stones were concerned, no one could compare to Ahmet. Deciding to throw a gala party for the band on April 17, 1971, to announce the release of the first single from their debut album on Atlantic, he flew with a small group of traveling companions to the south of France, where the Stones were just beginning what would become their mad and calamitous year of living in tax exile.
In every sense, the trip marked the start of Ahmet’s ascension to authentic full-blown rock royalty. As Stones tour manager Peter Rudge would later say, “During this period of his life, Ahmet was as high-profile as he had ever been and never, ever alone. I only ever saw him alone once at a meeting at Atlantic during one of those rare occasions when he was in the office. When he would travel, he was the first Puff Daddy. He always had a posse and you could see him coming from miles away.”
As Ahmet boarded the 747 that would take him to France, he was accompanied by David Geffen, Stephen Stills, Jerry Greenberg, and the writer George Trow, who was then researching his profile of Ahmet, which would not appear in The New Yorker magazine for another seven years. Sipping a Chivas and soda on ice as he sat in the first-class cabin, Ahmet listened as Jerry Greenberg pitched him on signing a band called Pacific Gas & Electric, who were then on Columbia. When Greenberg told him how much the deal would cost, Ahmet said, “I don’t think that figure appeals to me.”
Knowing Trow was observing his every move and would be writing about him for a publication read by those whom he valued most, Ahmet promptly transformed himself into a rock ’n’ roll version of Alexander Woollcott by telling the writer, “It is amusing, I think. For all their youthful charm, that group has as quotable a price as the utility for which they are whimsically named.”
Having always brilliantly controlled his own image in the press, Ahmet then stage-managed the interview Trow did with David Geffen during the flight. In Geffen’s words, “Ahmet said to me, ‘Make sure you only say good things.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you want me to tell him?’ He said, ‘I don’t care. Make it up.’ So I told him this story about how Ahmet had loaned me $50,000 and wouldn’t let me pay it back. Anyone who knows Ahmet knows that’s a made-up story. Later, Ahmet and I were having a big fight and he said to me, ‘You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve! I gave you fifty thousand dollars.’ I said, ‘Ahmet, I made that story up for George Trow.’ ”
Much as he had done with Geffen, Ahmet had invited Greenberg on the trip for a specific reason. A former musician who as a promotion man based in New Haven, Connecticut, had demonstrated an incredible knack for breaking records in his local market, Greenberg had been hired at Atlantic by Jerry Wexler in 1967. He had made his bones at the label by persuading Wexler to pay $5,000 for a hit record that had come to him in the mail entitled “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell & the Drells.
Greenberg soon learned that Wexler, the toughest task master in the business, expected him to be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. One year, Wexler ordered Greenberg into the office on Thanksgiving so he could do the mailing of a Wilson Pickett record being released the next day. In Greenberg’s words, “Wexler was a maniac, but a great maniac. . . . Once he called my house on Yom Kippur, wanting to discuss an urgent business matter. My wife said I was in synagogue. ‘What’s the number there? I’ll have him paged.’ ” As Greenberg recalled, “I was in B’nai Jacob in New Haven. It was a Conservative synogogue but they still wouldn’t have taken the call. Working for Jerry Wexler was like going into the Marines. You either came out a sergeant or they found you dead in a fucking swamp.”
While Greenberg’s prior contact with Ahmet at the label had been so limited that he initially thought Ahmet ran Atco while Wexler was in charge of Atlantic, Ahmet had summoned Greenberg to his office some weeks earlier to say, “I’m signing the Rolling Stones, we’re going to make the announcement next month in France, I want you to come with me, you’re the only one I want Mick Jagger to talk to when I’m not here.” When Ahmet learned Mica would be coming from Paris to join him in Cannes, he instructed Greenberg to bring his wife along and then took them both to Paris, where Greenberg had never been, for the weekend.
By taking Jerry Greenberg with him to the south of France, Ahmet effectively ended Greenberg’s term of service as Wexler’s second-in-command. From now on, Greenberg would be running the day-to-day operations at Atlantic, thereby allowing Ahmet to continue doing just as he pleased without having to worry about concerns that no longer really interested him.
Then twenty-eight years old and still functioning as Ahmet’s eager and loyal protégé, David Geffen had come along so he could get the inside track on managing the Stones’ next tour of America, a position coveted by a host of other music business heavies. By providing Geffen with unlimited access to Rupert Lowenstein and Mick Jagger during their visit, Ahmet was doing Geffen a favor that would also benefit him. At loose ends now that CSN&Y had broken up, Stephen Stills, whom Trow would later describe as “the odd man out” in the group, was there simply because he wanted to hang out with the Stones.
In the good old days when Ahmet and Jerry Wexler had set out on the road together in search of new talent and good times, the two men had been absolute peers united by their love for black roots music. Having ascended to brand-new heights by bringing the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band to Atlantic, Ahmet was now traveling like a potentate surrounded by courtiers whose music business survival depended in large part on his continuing favor. Nor was it an accident that Wexler himself was not around. For reasons best known only to himself, Ahmet had not invited him.
Although Geffen had already proven his own music business acumen by selling Tunafish Music, the publishing company he had formed for Laura Nyro, for $4 million, he was then still completely in thrall to Ahmet and happy just to spend time with him and Mica in the south of France. Nonetheless, Ahmet could not resist the urge to occasionally remind him of his proper place in the pecking order. When Geffen asked if there were any recording studios in France, Ahmet loftily replied, “France is like Brooklyn. They have everything.” In Geffen’s words, “It didn’t feel like a put-down. The cutting remarks were part of Ahmet’s sense of humor and not particular to me. He would also say things about Robert Stigwood, whom he considered a close friend and a very important manager. It was part of his nature and character. Ahmet was a complicated guy.”
Nor could Ahmet contain himself as he and Mica sat down with Rupert Lowenstein and Geffen for dinner that evening in the Hotel Majestic on La Croisette in Cannes. When Lowenstein, a descendant of a royal family that traced its lineage back to the Holy Roman Empire, suggested it was time for them all to go to the party for the Stones, Ahmet said there was no need to do so yet because he and Lowenstein were the hosts. When Lowenstein told Ahmet that Jagger had recently given a big party in London only to arrive there four hours late, Ahmet told him, “You’re not a rock-and-roll star, and the sooner you realize that, the happier you’ll be.”
By the time Ahmet arrived at the party at the Port Pierre Canto Club, for which Atlantic was footing the bill, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Mick Taylor were already there with their wives and girlfriends. As Ahmet and Jagger embraced like the close friends and business associates they had now become, Ahmet said, “We have to do the whole thing, don’t we?” Jagger replied, “If we had taps on our shoes, we could really do a number.”
Both men knew the real purpose of the evening was to jump-start the sales of the Stones’ new single as well as the album from which it came. While the party itself turned out to be a nonevent, even though Jagger did throw a glass of wine into the face of a photographer who had been bothering him all night, the English rock writer Nik Cohn accurately described what was really going on that evening by telling Trow, “Ahmet is the King of Rock and Roll. Ahmet is more important than Jagger . . . and more interesting. . . . Ahmet is really a figure, and Jagger is nothing more than a little rock-and-roll singer. And what is a rock-and-roll singer in the end?”
It was a question Keith Richards, Jagger’s boon companion and songwriting partner, might have been hard pressed to answer. Having left the yacht club early in the evening to find his beloved dog Okie, Richards would later explain his sudden departure by saying, “That was my only friend at the party, man.” Along with his companion, the Italian-born actress Anita Pallenberg, Richards then joined Ahmet, Stills, and Charlie Watts at bassist Bill Wyman’s house in Grasse for the real party, which went on all night. As Ahmet was being driven back to the Hotel Majestic in his limousine at dawn, he leaned forward and with great aplomb told the driver, “We are very restless people. Please drive faster.”
Ahmet’s unwavering faith in the Rolling Stones was amply rewarded when their first single on Atlantic, “Brown Sugar,” a song Jagger had originally wanted to call “Black Pussy” and which the band had first performed at Altamont, went to number one in America. The cover of Sticky Fingers, conceived by Andy Warhol for $30,000, featured a real zipper on a pair of very tight jeans worn by actor Joe Dallesandro. Because the zipper warped the first fifty thousand copies of the record when they were stacked, the zipper then had to be lowered to half-mast so the album could be shipped. The album became the Rolling Stones’ biggest seller to this point in time.
On May 27, it replaced Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s live 4 Way Street double album as the number one album on the Billboard charts and stayed there for three weeks before eventually going triple platinum (selling three million copies). For the first time in the band’s history, an album by the Rolling Stones topped both the British and American charts at the same time. Proving yet again how good he was at this business, Ahmet’s daring gamble had paid off immediately. Atlantic easily recou
ped the million-dollar advance he had given the Stones for Sticky Fingers.
For Jagger and Richards, the bad news was that because they had written and recorded a good deal of the album while still under contract to Allen Klein, their former manager owned the copyrights to many of the songs and so they did not earn the far more generous royalties on this material they would have been paid by Atlantic. The obvious solution was for Jagger and Richards to begin writing and recording new material for what was now their eagerly awaited second album on Atlantic. As Ahmet soon learned, this was a problem not even he could solve.
3
Despite their shared history and how hard they had worked together to ensure the success of the band, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had always been two birds of a completely different feather. While the ongoing tension between them had helped propel the band to superstar status, their widely divergent lifestyles now began taking precedence over their careers and the two found themselves at odds as never before. Ahmet did all he could to help speed the apparently endless process of recording their new album, but even he was forced to concede that in the Rolling Stones, he had finally met his match.
During the recording of Sticky Fingers, Keith Richards’s drug problems had become so severe that he did not even attend the session during which “Moonlight Mile,” the final track on the album, had been recorded. By the time the Stones found themselves living in luxury in the south of France in the spring of 1971, Richards and Anita Pallenberg, by now the parents of a young son, had both just managed to stop using heroin on a regular basis. Living like outlaws in a sumptous villa overlooking the sea that soon became a riotous jet-set commune filled with a motley crew of beautiful people and high-born hangers-on, they had little use for the far more sedate manner in which Mick Jagger was now conducting himself and nothing at all in common with his new girlfriend, the Nicaraguan-born Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias.
The Last Sultan Page 29
