In a series of photographs taken in the locker room that day by Ahmet’s good friend Jean Pigozzi, Ahmet can be seen in a soaking-wet white shirt with his pants down around his ankles swilling from a bottle of celebratory champagne alongside Cosmos coach Eddie Firmani and a player who wears nothing but a towel. As the defender Werner Roth, who had grown up in Queens and attended Brooklyn Technical High School, recalled, “Ahmet brought everyone into that locker room and every arrogant rock ’n’ roller turned into a pontificating little boy in front of Pelé.”
Two months later, Ahmet journeyed to Beijing with the team. As he would later tell The New York Times, the team’s eventual goal was to become the best in the world “and the way to get there is to play anywhere against the best at any time. We’ve never shied away from anyone.” Because of the unlikely marriage Ahmet had brokered between the sport and rock ’n’ roll, an ownership group composed of Peter Frampton; Rick Wakeman, the keyboardist of Yes; Paul Simon; Frank Barsalona of Premier Talent; rock manager Dee Anthony; and Terry Ellis and Chris Wright of Chrysalis Records was awarded the franchise for the Philadelphia Fury.
The calamitous collapse of the Atari game corporation in 1983 caused Warner Communications to report a post-tax loss of $418 million after twelve consecutive profitable years. As part of his plan to rebuild the Cosmos so he could sell it, Ross persuaded Ahmet and Nesuhi to resign their positions with a club that by now was no longer attracting rock stars and celebrities to its games. By 1985, Warner Communications had sold or closed ten separate ventures. A year later, the Cosmos folded.
While Ahmet had managed to have as much fun as possible with the Cosmos, he had also popularized a sport that youngsters all over America would eventually play, helping to pave the way for the United States to host the World Cup for the first time in 1994. In record business terms, Ahmet had helped break soccer in America.
EIGHTEEN
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
“I knew John Hammond, Jerry Wexler, and Sam Phillips and I’m here to tell you Ahmet was the greatest record executive who ever lived. He was more creative, he had wider taste, he kept himself in the game longer, he had the greatest rapport with the artists, and he made a market again and again and kept it. He did R&B, free jazz, hard rock, soul music, psychedelic rock, disco, and all that stuff in the 1980s and 1990s. He also happened to be kinky in a bunch of different ways, one of which was that he wasn’t particularly dedicated to what you and I know as the truth. The other was that he was comfortable playing the rogue in a world where economic justice wasn’t even a consideration.”
—Dave Marsh
1
With Atlantic making more money than ever and Doug Morris handling the day-to-day operations as president of the label while Sheldon Vogel oversaw financial matters as vice chairman, Ahmet’s “real job” at the company during the 1980s had become, in the words of writer Eric Poole, “to play the role of Ahmet Ertegun: taking calls from top agents and managers, stroking the important acts, showing up at the shows, flying to New Orleans for a party for Robert Plant.” As Ahmet also told Poole, “There’s a lot of work to do around here. Fortunately, I have people to do it for me.”
While many employees at the label no longer saw Ahmet on a regular basis in the office, he still “set the tone for all operations” and remained the man in charge. Having reached an age when most men begin thinking seriously about retirement, he showed no signs of slowing down and could still stay out until four in the morning only to appear at a company meeting five hours later looking fresh and alert and then astound all those present by coming up with the breakthrough idea.
With artists like Foreigner, AC/DC, Twisted Sister, Yes, White Lion, INXS, Genesis, and Debbie Gibson forming the mainstay of the Atlantic roster during this decade, the label bore little resemblance to what it had been back when Ahmet was still going into the studio on a regular basis to record the music he loved. Admitting the company had “slipped badly in jazz and rhythm and blues” but that he was working as hard as he could to rectify the problem, Ahmet had developed a completely different set of ears for the music Atlantic needed to keep releasing to continue earning huge profits. In his words, “I listen to some current things but mostly I play people like Pee Wee Russell and Bud Freeman and always, Jelly Roll Morton’s ‘Shreveport Stomp.’ In my opinion, that’s the hottest record ever made.”
Having risen to a position of overwhelming power in a business that no longer interested or challenged him, Ahmet seized upon an idea for an annual pay-per-view cable television awards show and transformed it into an institution to which he began devoting nearly as much time and energy as he had put into building Atlantic Records. The original concept for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation had come from a producer named Bruce Brandwein, who wanted to use the organization to lend credibility to a yearly awards ceremony at which the greatest names in rock would be honored and then perform, thereby creating a must-see television event for their fans.
Along with music business attorney David Braun and Suzan Hochberg Evans, who had just graduated from Brooklyn Law School after having majored in communications and journalism at Boston University, Brandwein met with Ahmet to pitch him on the concept in the winter of 1983. After the meeting, Ahmet called Evans to say he was interested in the idea and wanted to discuss it again but only with her. As they were talking about the project in his home one night, Ahmet said, “Why should I do this if it will be a profitable organization for someone else but a charity for me? If this is going to be a well-respected organization the artists are going to buy into and I can put my stamp on, it has to be not-for-profit. It can’t be an excuse to do a television show.”
After naming a few people he thought should get involved to start the ball rolling, Ahmet picked up the phone, called Noreen Woods, and said, “Noreen, what’s the name of that kid who runs Sire Records?” He then sent Evans, who was twenty-four years old, to see forty-one-year-old Seymour Stein.
Instructing Evans to send informational packets about the project to Stein, Allen Grubman, and Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner, Ahmet invited them all to lunch at Pearl’s Chinese restaurant. In Grubman’s words, “I was sitting there eating one spare rib after another as Ahmet began talking about a baseball hall of fame and this hall of fame and all these halls of fame. And then after a few years, it grew into something enormous. Out of a simple lunch of Chinese food. It was unbelievable.”
On April 20, 1983, the four men formed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation. Selecting Evans as the foundation’s executive director, Ahmet installed her in an office three doors down from him at Atlantic and began soliciting contributions from other record companies to fund the project. As she would later say, “Atlantic Records made a contribution and I drew my salary out of that account so Ahmet really did bankroll us in the beginning.” In Jann Wenner’s words, “You couldn’t really have an institution driven by the TV show. It had to be the other way around because in order to make it work, it had to be nonprofit. Breaking the deal with the TV producer took a year or a year and a half with depositions and everything but I just said we were not going to do it that way. And then the real struggle was to figure out what it would be and where it would be located.”
Before the board could begin searching for a physical location, it had to incorporate the foundation, formulate the rules for induction, and create a nominating committee. As Evans recalled, “When we had the early meetings with Ahmet and Jann and Seymour and Allen Grubman, Ahmet used to say, ‘What kind of board meeting is this? This is like a Saturday Night Live writers meeting. We have to get serious.’ Allen Grubman used to look around and say, ‘Ahmet, the five of us, this is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Is this going to take off, or are we it?’ ”
Within a year, Bob Krasnow, the head of Elektra, and Jon Landau, the former music writer who managed Bruce Springsteen, had been brought into the mix but in Evans’s words, “We were really concentrating on the rules for induction
and election so we could start honoring artists. That was phase one. We always thought we would eventually purchase a brownstone in New York City and have a few pieces of memorabilia or an actual hall of fame with plaques but that was down the line.”
Shortly before the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame held its first induction ceremony in 1986, Cleveland disc jockey Norm Knight contacted the board about his city’s interest in becoming the institution’s permanent home. Knight then came to New York with a delegation of business leaders and Cleveland mayor George Voinovich for what everyone thought would be, in Evans’s words, “A courtesy meeting but they made such an impressive presentation that Noreen Woods passed me a note that said, ‘Pack your bags.’ Then Ahmet said, ‘If Cleveland is doing this, do we have a fiduciary duty to investigate other possible sites?’ ”
Once people learned about the project, the board was “approached and pitched by Philadelphia, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, and this went on for many months.” When Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, made his pitch, in Evans’s words, “He said, ‘You know, I really love Bruce Springheim.’ We all looked at each other and said, ‘All right, we’re not going to Chicago.’ ”
After 600,000 fans had signed a petition favoring Cleveland as the site for the institution and the city had pledged to provide public funds to pay for construction costs, the board decided, as Evans would later say, “if the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was going to be a success, Cleveland was the place to do it because they were serious about it, they were very energetic, they really wanted it, and they really needed it. It was definitely the best deal.”
The news that Cleveland had been selected as the home for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was announced at the institution’s first awards dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in 1986. With twelve hundred people in attendance, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Jimmie Rodgers, Jimmy Yancey, Robert Johnson, John Hammond, Alan Freed, and Sam Phillips were named as the institution’s first honorees.
Right from the start, Ahmet insisted the only person who should design the building that would house the institution was I. M. Pei, the world-famous sixty-six-year-old Chinese-born architect whom Jacqueline Kennedy had selected to create the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Cambridge. The winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, Pei had also designed the John Hancock Tower in Boston, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, and the glass and steel pyramid at the Louvre in Paris.
After Ahmet had called Pei to say, “We want you to do this,” the architect contacted Evans a few days later and said he had told his daughter Ahmet had asked him to design the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She said, “But you’re an old man. What do you know about rock and roll?” Pei told Evans, “Suzan, those are fighting words. I’m going to do it.” Because Pei “really didn’t know anything about rock ’n’ roll,” Ahmet, Wenner, Stein, and Evans took him to concerts in New York and sent him books about rock ’n’ roll. They then escorted the architect on a weekend trip to Graceland.
After arriving in Memphis, Ahmet learned that the Louis Vuitton case specially made to hold his shoes had been lost in transit. So obsessed with everything made by the designer that when a friend facetiously inquired if he owned a Vuitton toothbrush, his immediate reply was to ask if they made them, Ahmet was beside himself. As Jann Wenner would later say, “Ahmet was so panicked that he had Suzan Evans order our chauffeur to wait for fourteen hours at the airport at who knows what cost to recover it.”
After touring Graceland, everyone continued on to New Orleans, where they spent the night visiting Tipitina’s and Cosmo’s Factory. A couple of days later, Pei called Evans and said, “I’ve got it. I get what rock ’n’ roll is. It’s about energy and that’s what my building is going to reflect. Energy.”
While the original budget Cleveland had proposed in 1985 was $26 million, the sum quickly rose to $40 million. Financed through a combination of public funds, a bond issue that was repaid through hotel taxes, and “a lot of private donations,” the final cost of constructing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame reached $100 million. Situated on the shores of Lake Erie, the building Pei designed features a slanting glass wall not unlike the one he had constructed at the Louvre.
Coated in white metal, the seven-level main structure is connected by a walkway to an adjoining circular performance space mounted on a pillar. Employing “the forms of shopping mall architecture,” Pei used “large walkways and escalators” to allow visitors to “travel from exhibition gallery to gallery effortlessly.” By combining “off-centered wraparounds and angled walls,” the architect hoped to provide what he called “a sense of tumultuous youthful energy, rebelling, flailing about.”
On September 2, 1995, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened its doors with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Yoko Ono and Little Richard, followed by a seven-hour outdoor concert broadcast live by HBO from nearby Cleveland Browns stadium. Ahmet and Mica attended the event with their good friends Renaldo and Caroline Herrera and Sid and Mercedes Bass. As Evans would later say, “Ahmet was delighted that weekend because it would never have happened without him. He was so revered and so highly respected that everyone wanted to work with him on it and he was really the force behind this. He was always on the phone with any problems we were having and he put his stamp of approval on everything. Ahmet got the whole music industry actively involved.”
In Jann Wenner’s words, “Ahmet was the guiding moral and aesthetic sensibility and consciousness. All along the way, decisions had to be made on every level. How do you reconcile the formality and elegance of a museum with the rudeness and street stuff of an art form like this? Without getting so precious? Throughout all of this, Ahmet was the lodestone about what would be appropriate and what would be in good taste and what would not. In the end, it was always, ‘What does Ahmet think?’ Because Ahmet had the vision.”
In much the same way Herb Abramson, Jerry Wexler, and Jerry Greenberg had taken care of the day-to-day business at Atlantic, Wenner “deputized” himself to Ahmet by saying, “Okay, I’ll be the guy who gets it all organized. I’ll be the hit man.” As he would add, “In the record business, marketing was always about how to get your records played on the air for free. Therefore, what the record business guys knew about marketing was cash and cocaine. Because of their huge success over the years, they all thought they were experts at this. They were just experts at payola. These people were now on the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame trying to build a hundred-million-dollar building and they just did not have a clue.”
Nonetheless, in the house Ahmet had built, Wenner decided to surprise the man who had made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a reality by naming the main exhibition hall after him. While Ahmet seemed “nonplussed” by the honor, no one took more pleasure when it came to inducting new honorees. Tinged with humor and his own brand of erudite music scholarship, the speeches Ahmet carefully wrote by hand on lined yellow notepaper and then delivered in his characteristic hipster drawl reflected his deep, abiding love for a particularly American art form he believed “had changed history and popular culture” and so deserved to be preserved for future generations.
The annual induction ceremony also soon became noteworthy for the incredible collection of rock superstars who would perform at the end of the dinner. In Wenner’s words, “Some years, you had these fantastic jam sessions with Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, and Bruce Springsteen all playing together onstage. When those jams took place, it was the best show of the year and I felt it had to be shared with a larger audience.”
Although Ahmet initially “mightily resisted” televising the event, Wenner insisted “it was wrong to be that elitist about it. The nature and character of the dinner wouldn’t change so long as we didn’t make it into a live
show. We could tape it.” In typical fashion, Ahmet finally conceded by saying “I don’t think the issue is whether or not we’re whores. I think what we’re discussing is how much we charge.” In 2008, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s nonperformer award was renamed the Ahmet Ertegun Award.
While some questioned the basic notion of enshrining an anti-establishment art form like rock ’n’ roll in such a formal setting and there were continuing controversies concerning the nominating and selection process, those who had labored to bring about the creation of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame did not let it affect the way they did business with one another. Even as he and Ahmet were collaborating to form the institution in 1984, Bob Krasnow of Elektra was doing all he could to sign a band whose last album had sold only twenty thousand copies. As he would later say, “Ahmet wanted Metallica in the worst way and we weren’t supposed to outbid each other inside the Warner Music Group. They were at half a million for the advance and I said, ‘Fuck it,’ and I went to a million. Doug Morris went crazy and went to Ahmet and he called me one night just as I got home.”
As Krasnow recalled, “I get on the phone and Ahmet says, ‘I was in this limo the other night and they told me you were in this limo with those guys from Metallica and you told them we were a piece of shit and I’m going to fuck you up and you’re going to pay for this.’ It was just outrageous but I couldn’t answer because he wouldn’t let me. Not yelling but forceful and swearing like crazy and Ahmet didn’t swear that much. But he was pissed.”
Thinking Ahmet was going to get him fired for what he had done, Krasnow hung up. The next day, he called Steve Ross to let him know he intended to do whatever he could to sign the band. “And Ross said, ‘I’m not getting involved.’ That was his brilliance. We sold only 200,000 copies of the first album and Ahmet was kind of happy that nothing really happened and the next album sold twenty million worldwide. I hated competing with Ahmet. But when I did beat him, I loved it.”
The Last Sultan Page 36
