[Dixielandjazz] Ahmet Ertegun biography reviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

A Dapper Music Magnate and the Empire He Built
by Janet Maslin
New York Times, November 21, 2011
Robert Greenfield is the author of "S.T.P.: A Journey Through America With the Rolling
Stones," one of the most rollicking accounts ever written about a rock band at the
peak of its powers. But Mr. Greenfield's latest book is much more respectful and
sedate. No wonder: the subject of "The Last Sultan" is Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish-born
record company executive who set the high-water mark for personal panache and who
remains a sacrosanct figure to most who knew him. Much of "The Last Sultan" is devoted
to hyping and preserving the Ertegun legend.
The early part of the book, about Mr. Ertegun's privileged upbringing as a son of
the Turkish ambassador to Switzerland, France and the United States in the 1920s
and '30s, is perhaps its most unexpected. Mr. Ertegun was born a week after the Treaty
of Lausanne was signed on July 24, 1923, and the Republic of Turkey was created.
His elegance and diplomatic skills were ingrained early. So was the outsize personality
that would sometimes cause him to be referred to as Ataturk (after the republic's
first president) by the tour manager of the Rolling Stones.
Ambassador Ertegun was powerful enough to stop MGM from making a film out of Franz
Werfel's "Forty Days of Musa Dagh," an impassioned novel about the Turkish mass killings
of Armenians during World War I. (Turkey has adamantly rejected the label of genocide.)
And Ahmet, his younger son (the older was Nesuhi, who also became a music executive),
inherited that same force of personality. According to Mr. Greenfield, Ahmet in his
later years considered making a public acknowledgment of Turkey's role in the massacre
as a way of reducing the stigma attached to it, but he never got the chance. (He
died in 2006 after being injured in a freak accident at the Beacon Theater, just
before the Rolling Stones played their concert for former President Bill Clinton's
birthday and Martin Scorsese's film "Shine a Light.")
"The Last Sultan" follows the young Ahmet Ertegun into the music world and describes
how he jointly founded Atlantic Records, the company over which he long presided.
The hagiography here is intense, but it sometimes wavers. Mr. Greenfield praises
Mr. Ertegun's affinities for jazz and blues, noting that Mr. Ertegun felt that he
knew more about black life than most Americans did. But he also points out that "what
Ahmet did not know about actually running a record company was equally staggering."
Mr. Ertegun founded Atlantic in 1947 with Herb Abramson, who had a degree in dentistry
but preferred the music business because, as he told his wife, "I never saw a hip
filling." Together, the men toured the South on the hunt for talent, though they
well knew that the recording pioneers and folklorists John and Alan Lomax had taken
the same route 15 years before. One of their early discoveries, in 1953, was Ray
Charles, who had already been making records but wound up on the Atlantic label.
Here, as elsewhere in "The Last Sultan," Mr. Greenfield emphasizes the importance
of the Ertegun factor without making much of a case for it. "Whereas we thought we
were producing Ray Charles, I realized by the third session that he was not only
teaching me about music but also showing me how to make records," Mr. Ertegun once
said.
But the area in which the Ertegun style was incontrovertible was recreation. An inveterate
partier and ladies' man, he had as much of an affinity for mind-altering substances
and abundant, beautiful women as any of Atlantic's musicians ever did. He was the
rare businessman who outshone rock stars in the debauchery department.
"The Last Sultan" describes his uneasy, ultimately unhappy partnership with Jerry
Wexler, who supplanted Mr. Abramson and had much more forceful opinions about music
than Mr. Ertegun did. Mr. Wexler had a great ear for musical talent. But in one story
that Mr. Wexler never cared to repeat, he didn't want to pursue rights to the first
Beatles album because he found it "derivative" and because he so preferred artists
like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding.
It was Mr. Redding, by the way, who mistakenly addressed Mr. Ertegun as Omelet, figuring
that he had earned that nickname because he liked eggs. When Taylor Hackford's film
"Ray" gave Ray Charles that line, and put an actor playing the debonair Mr. Ertegun
in two-toned shoes, Mr. Ertegun's equally stylish wife, Mica, had to work hard to
calm him down. According to Mr. Greenfield, a much better Ertegun film reference
can be seen in Frank Zappa's "200 Motels," in which a character excitedly picks up
a towel that Mr. Ertegun supposedly used as a bathmat six weeks earlier. The character
snorts the towel and gets high.
Much of "The Last Sultan" concerns business deals, recapitulates other record-business
books and is populated by figures not widely known outside the music world. Two notable
exceptions are David Geffen, to whom Mr. Ertegun could be quite cruel, and Steve
Ross, who ran the Warner Music Group (which eventually included Atlantic) as "one
of the pioneers of monster executive compensation." Mr. Ross paved the way for the
luxury-loving stage of Mr. Ertegun's life.
The best stories in this book have less to do with music than with Mr. Ertegun's
ways of impressing, teasing and outfoxing his rivals. He could feign interest in
a band to make it look more attractive to a competitor. He could appropriate somebody
else's words verbatim when it came to voicing excitement about, say, Genesis -- a
group that may not have excited him at all. He could tease Mr. Wexler by replacing
his passport photo with an obscene shot of a woman with a donkey. Mr. Wexler once
suggested tartly that Mr. Ertegun's tombstone ought to read, "He Meant It When He
Said It."


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, 
"I'll serve you, but don't start anything."