After seeing Kid Rock perform at the showcase, Flom signed him for $100,000 and released Devil Without a Cause, his debut album on Lava, on August 18, 1998. In Flom’s words, “It was one of the incredible albums of all time but nobody else liked it. The people at Atlantic thought it was a joke, the industry thought it was a joke, radio hated it, press hated it, MTV, nothing was going.” The album languished on the charts for months until Flom arranged for Kid Rock to perform at an industry party in Los Angeles. “I dragged Ahmet to the show and the room must have had fifty people in it. During the set, Ahmet turned to me and said, ‘You know you found Elvis.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know but I need someone else to help.’ ”
The next day, Kid Rock came to the Peninsula Hotel, where he, Flom, and Ahmet “all sat around the pool in bathrobes and the two of them became thick as thieves. It was a perfect match. Ahmet was as happy hanging out with Kid Rock as Mick Jagger or the dauphin of France. He got it and he never wavered. For a few years, I was so close to Kid Rock that he used to introduce me as his dad and then it changed. Ahmet supplanted me as the father figure.”
As Kid Rock, whose friends refer to him as “Kid,” “Rock,” or “Bob,” would later say, “We did this show in L.A. Some celebrity shindig. Name ’em and they were there. Who’s Who. I was onstage playing and no one gives a shit. Everyone’s talking. Whatever. Got their noses up each other’s asses. And there was this old dude standing there with a cane staring at us. Watched the whole show. And the next day I get this call. ‘This is Ahmet Ertegun. I just want to know how’s my young Elvis doing?’ That was pretty much the first thing he ever said to me.”
After Lava released “Bawitdaba” as a single in May 1999, Kid Rock “proceeded to blow up overnight.” With a chorus that sampled Sugar Hill Gang’s classic “Rapper’s Delight” and a title that came from Love-bug Starski’s “Live at the Fever,” the song began with Kid Rock repeating the lyrics, “Bawitdaba da bang/a dang diggy diggy diggy/said the boogy/said up jump the boogy” six times before howling out his name. Repeating the introductory line four more times, he then went into his own wild, twisted version of an old-school rap over a thrashing, convulsive, head-banging heavy metal backing track.
A month after the song was released, Kid Rock’s debut album on Lava went platinum. After he performed the song at the 1999 Woodstock Festival, the album went double platinum and eventually sold seven million copies. In 2000, “Bawitdaba” was nominated for a Grammy Award in both the Best New Artist and Best Hard Rock Performance categories.
With his long unkempt blond hair flying in his face as he performed bare-chested in shades and a white panama hat or his trademark red fedora, Kid Rock was a natural-born hell-raiser who fused elements of rap, heavy metal, and country and western music while projecting an irresistibly authentic white working-class persona that immediately crossed him over into the mainstream pop market. Although Ahmet was old enough to be his grandfather when they met, the two men soon became close friends.
While working on his second album, Kid Rock invited Ahmet to come to Detroit with him to hear some of his new material. After taking Jason Flom and Ahmet to a little café “he fell in love with” where they ate barbecue pork sandwiches, the three men went into the studio together. As Kid Rock recalled, “I’ll never forget that day. I get into the studio, I’m a wreck, I’ve slept maybe an hour. We’re discussing me being a wreck and Jason Flom said, ‘You gotta slow down, Rock. You’re going to kill yourself.’ Blah blah blah blah. Ahmet leaned over and said, ‘You know what, man? Some of the best rock ’n’ roll records ever made were made on drugs.’ I don’t think he meant it like don’t stop. He was just being honest. He was always a very honest person.”
Ahmet and Kid Rock then began hanging out together on a fairly regular basis. Scheduled to have lunch with Ahmet at his weekend home in Southampton one day, Rock called to say he couldn’t make it only to have Ahmet say, “ ‘I don’t care what shape you’re in. Get over here.’ I go over there, he goes, ‘What’s the matter, man?’ I go, ‘I been up all night. I haven’t been doing good things. I’m having girl trouble.’ I’m waiting to hear this fucking wisdom from this man who has seen and done it all and he’s like, ‘You want a Baby Ruth, man? A Baby Ruth will make you feel better.’ So here comes James with a fucking tray of Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and I had a Baby Ruth. Then Ahmet got on the phone with my girlfriend and straightened everything out.”
Rock then went to visit Ahmet and Mica in Bodrum. In his words, “I had never seen anything like that house. Unbelievable. I said to Ahmet, ‘What’s this?’ Ahmet goes, ‘That stone’s from the Mausoleum. Leave it alone.’ I was putting out cigars on it. I hadn’t met Mica yet so I put on a suit and tie. I just thought it was the right thing to do. Ahmet’s always sharp so I dressed up.”
As Mica would later say, “I arrived from Paris and I saw this man in this blasting heat in this navy blue suit with a tie on and I said, ‘What happened? Are you crazy?’ And he said, ‘Well, I knew you were coming and I thought I would get dressed up.’ Kid Rock is very smart and well educated and he’s crazy. He came and stayed with us in Turkey twice.”
At a dinner party in New York one night, Ahmet was busily talking to people at his table when Rock came over and asked his permission to ask Mica to dance with him. In the words of Erith Landeau, Ahmet and Mica’s longtime friend, “Ahmet sort of looked at him like, ‘What the hell do you want from me? If she wants to dance, go dance with her.’ He invited Mica to dance and he was holding her like she was made of Chinese porcelain. He was so careful not to hold her too tight and crease her dress. It was so cute and so touching.”
In the summer of 2000, Ahmet went to Detroit to record a young jazz saxophone player named James Carter whom Atlantic had signed. Jason Fine, who would go on to become executive editor of Rolling Stone magazine but was then a staff writer who had been assigned to interview Ahmet would later say, “They wanted to make a record in Detroit where James Carter is from in a club so it would have the feeling of an old jazz record and Ahmet loved the idea so they went to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, the oldest continuously running jazz club in the country. A tiny funky old place where maybe fifty people could sit in vinyl booths and at an old bar.”
The club was so small that Ahmet had to set up a mobile recording studio in an RV parked outside. Seventy-seven years old and wearing a long wool sport coat, a crisp white shirt with an open collar, and pressed light tan pants, Ahmet was using a bamboo cane to get around but spent the entire night “running back and forth between the mobile studio and the club.”
Because Aretha Franklin was scheduled to sing and could not abide air conditioning, Fine recalled, “It was a hundred and ten degrees in the club. When you ordered a drink, the ice had melted by the time it came from the bar to the table. I was sweating like a pig but Ahmet looked as cool as he could be. He had an incredible multigenerational array of sax players onstage and was telling Aretha he wanted her to sing the blues on this one, calling out the songs, working up the arrangements, and running the session. It was unbelievable.”
After the session ended, Fine, who was then thirty-four years old, sat around drinking and talking with Ahmet until nearly three A.M. At eleven the next morning, Ahmet’s driver came to take Fine to lunch with Ahmet at “an incredible house in Bloomfield Hills designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s students that was owned by Ahmet’s old friend Alfred Taubman,” a well-known real estate developer and philanthropist who had pioneered the modern shopping mall.
In Fine’s words, “There was an absurd amount of art all over the house. Picassos next to Egon Schiele etchings and Lichtenstein and Degas. The walls were covered with this stuff.” Still hungover from the night before, Fine was escorted by the butler to the dining room table, where Ahmet was sitting with the multiple Grammy Award-winning singer Anita Baker, Kid Rock, and the current love of Rock’s life, Pamela Anderson, the buxom blond model, actress, and Playboy Playmate who had formerly been married to Tommy Lee
, the drummer in Mötley Crüe.
“Kid was wearing long red shorts, a white shirt, and a white bowler hat with a red bandanna on it,” Fine recalled. “Pam was wearing a purple miniskirt and a white tank top out of which she was exploding. At one point, we walked to the bathroom at the same time and she stopped in front of this Lichtenstein and said, ‘This is so Pop.’ And I thought to myself, ‘You are so Pop.’ She looked just like the Pop Art on the walls.”
At the table, Ahmet presided over a discussion about the best jazz singers as well as the early days of Rolling Stone magazine and his relationship with Jann Wenner. At one point, he asked, “Ya boys want hot dogs?” Ringing a bell, he told a servant, “Hot dogs, please,” and they were then served on silver trays accompanied by silver bowls filled with condiments. After everyone had drunk a good deal of wine, Fine did a short interview with Ahmet. When the meal ended around four o’clock, a still “wiped out” Fine thought he would return to his hotel room for a nap.
Taking him right back to the club, Ahmet ran “another amazing session, saying things like, ‘The organ’s a little loud. Maybe we should change drummers on this song.’ He had unbelievable control of everything and Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson and Natalie Cole came down. All the generations of music Ahmet had been involved with were in this funky little club in Detroit—jazz and soul, Aretha and James Carter and Kid Rock.” According to Rock, “I never saw that kind of energy in a guy that age. He could keep up with me and anybody can tell you, I can go. But Ahmet would keep up with me.”
During the second week in January two years later, Rock was celebrating his thirty-first birthday with Anderson in a luxury villa with a swimming pool in Careyes, Mexico. “We’re by ourselves and after about two days, I go, ‘I love you but I got nothing else to say to you. I’m out of things to talk about. Can’t fuck anymore. We’ve done that. What are we going to do here for the next seven days?’ She says, ‘Why don’t you invite some of your friends?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t have friends with private jets and shit.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, wait a minute.’ So I called the town house looking for Ahmet and Mica answered. She goes, ‘He’s in L.A. I’m sure he’d love to come.’ I call Ahmet. Foop! He was there the next day.”
Flying to Mexico in a private plane with Veronique Simon and a couple who were Rock’s friends, Ahmet and his traveling companions arrived at the villa after a long drive. In Simon’s words, “The villa was fine but there was nothing to do and Kid Rock was absolutely drunk all the time. Pamela didn’t eat and she didn’t drink because she wanted to stay as she was and I started to build a relationship with her and Ahmet was in the middle of nowhere with Kid Rock and he was younger than all these people who were drunk with nothing to say.” Going into business with Simon, Anderson then became the spokeswoman for the Simon Solution Two-Step System for Fuller Plumper Lips, also known as the Pamela Anderson Lip Plumper.
“Ahmet hung out with us for five days,” Kid Rock said. “It was great because we had a Mexican chef who went to school in France and all we could say was fucking huevos rancheros and guacamole and chips. So all we did was drink Coronas and eat that shit for like two, three days. But when Ahmet finally got there, he would order for us in French. We also had a mariachi band and I got up and I was trying to jam with them and I was shit-faced and Ahmet was like, ‘Sit down. You’re drunk!’ ”
Later that year, Ahmet invited Rock to join him at a dinner after the New York premiere of the HBO movie The Gathering Storm, in which Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave portrayed Winston and Clementine Churchill. As Rock recalled, “Winston Churchill’s grandson was there and all the New York elite, and I’m like, ‘Ahmet, I got on a wife beater and cowboy boots.’ ‘No, don’t worry. Nobody’s dressed up. Come on over.’ Sure enough, I walk in there and you could hear a pin drop. I sit down next to him and go, ‘You motherfucker.’ And he’s like, ‘You look good, man.’ ”
In a photograph taken by Bill Cunningham that appeared in the Sunday New York Times on October 27, 2002, Ahmet and Kid Rock can be seen decked out in matching red fedoras looking very much like two high school buddies dressed up for the prom in clothes they just stole from a secondhand store. “Bette Midler does this thing for the parks in New York City,” Rock would later say. “So I’m like, ‘Let’s get sharp and wear identical suits and hats,’ Ahmet’s like, ‘That’s awesome. Let’s do it!’ Full matching black suits, red ties, and red hats.”
Ahmet had first seen Bette Midler perform for “a convention of hairdressers” in 1972 at the Upstairs at the Downstairs, a hip bistro on West 56th Street. Having already made a name for herself by appearing with her pianist Barry Manilow at the Continental Baths at Broadway and 74th Street where the audience was almost entirely male and usually attired only in bath towels, Midler knocked Ahmet out that night with her snappy patter, great pipes, and unmistakable style. Saying “I’ve never been so stunned by a performer,” he signed her to Atlantic and then co-produced The Divine Miss M, her first album for the label. Even after the singer had left Atlantic in 1995 to record for Mo Ostin at Warner Brothers Records, she and Ahmet remained good friends.
Recalling Ahmet and Kid Rock’s appearance at her benefit gala, Midler said, “It was hilarious, It was the best costume ever. I think the theme was, ‘Come as You Wish You Were.’ They were wearing matching red fedoras but when Ahmet took his off, he had a toupee under it. I laughed and laughed. Kid Rock liked to have a good time and had access to Pam Anderson so why wouldn’t Ahmet like to hang out with him? There was no Pam Anderson around Mick Jagger.” In the words of Lisa Robinson, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair magazine, “Ahmet always seemed as delighted to be around Kid Rock as he was around Mick Jagger. He really got a kick out of him. It was a very mutually affectionate relationship.”
Rock was with Ahmet one night “at this big party uptown” during one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction weeks in New York City “and everybody was there. Everyone. From Springsteen on down. Me and Ahmet are sitting there chilling and Mick Jagger walks in. And he recognizes me and comes over and says, ‘Hey, Bobby, how you doing?’ Gives me a kiss. Gives Ahmet a kiss. Walks around the room and walks out. And Ahmet goes, ‘You make him nervous, man!’ ”
3
On May 29, 2000, during the Memorial Day weekend, Ahmet suffered what Mica would later call “a pretty serious stroke” at their home in Southampton. Although he did not lose consciousness, Ahmet was rushed to a local hospital. By the time he was transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, it was too late for doctors, in Mica’s words, “to puncture the retina of his eye to release the pressure” and he lost the sight in his right eye.
Continuing to maintain a schedule that would have daunted a man half his age, Ahmet never spoke publicly about being unable to see out of his right eye and many who were closest to him, Kid Rock among them, never knew he was partially blind. When Dave Marsh saw Ahmet using a cane at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame meeting, he asked him if it was his knees or his hips that were bothering him. Without going into further detail, Ahmet said, “It’s my stroke.” By then, he had begun taking anticoagulants to prevent blood clots from forming in his circulatory system.
A year later at the age of seventy-eight, Ahmet underwent triple bypass and aortic valve repair surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. As Mica would later say, “Ahmet wanted to go to the Cleveland Clinic to have it done but they told him they had the best person, Dr. Mehmet Oz, to do it. Ahmet said, ‘I don’t want to be operated on by a Turk’ but then he gave in.” Oz, who would become a media celebrity, was, in Mica’s words, “brilliant and he did a fabulous job. Ahmet recovered fairly quickly from that and he had no pain or shortness of breath.”
While Ahmet was supposed to be sleeping one night in the hospital, he overheard two doctors discussing whether he would survive the procedure. “Up to that point,” he would later say, “I was taking everything very lightly. I thought, ‘As soon as I get out of here, I’ll start drinking again. Booze. Smoking. Eve
rything, right?’ But when I heard that, I said, ‘Oh.’ ”
One of the doctors then gave Ahmet a detailed analysis of the wear and tear that his tumultuous lifestyle had wreaked upon him. When Ahmet asked how he knew all this, the doctor replied, “I know because I’ve seen what it’s done to your body. Don’t think all that’s just gone by.” Having smoked cigarettes for years, Ahmet promptly quit cold turkey with “no withdrawal symptoms at all” and regularly began doing physical rehabilitation exercises. As his old friend Julio Mario Santo Domingo said of Ahmet in 2002, “He must be the strongest man in the world, like a Turkish wrestler. The abuse he has subjected his body to is not to be believed—he must have very special genes.”
Ahmet proved this point yet again by surviving a protracted bout with listeria, a rare but potentially lethal bacterial infection he may have contracted from eating unpasteurized cheese. Symptoms traditionally associated with listeria include fever, muscle aches, and nausea or diarrhea. If the infection spreads to the nervous system, it can cause convulsions and lead to meningitis and so is usually treated in a hospital with intravenous doses of antibiotics.
Mica at first thought Ahmet had “wisteria” and could not understand how a flower could make him so ill. After she understood the real nature of his illness, she said, “It was a very, very serious thing, and he had to spend two months in the hospital and was now a little more debilitated.” From his bed at New York-Presbyterian, Ahmet continued working with Frances Chantly, who had become his assistant in 2000 and always referred to him as “Mr. Ertegun.” In her words, “He said I was helping keep him alive by making him work.”
While Ahmet was still the patriarch at Atlantic and continued coming to work on a daily basis after being released from the hospital, his role at the label had become largely ceremonial. Jason Flom and Craig Kallman were now responsible for overseeing the music released by the company. A lifelong record fanatic who by the age of thirteen had already begun amassing the 350,000 LPs that would eventually comprise the largest vinyl collection in the world, Kallman had begun his career in the music business as a teenage deejay playing disco, punk, rock, reggae, New Wave, alternative, and electronic music in clubs like Danceteria, Area, the Palladium, and the Tunnel.
The Last Sultan Page 41
