[Dixielandjazz] Ahmet Ertegun biography reviewed - New York Times, November 27, 2011

[Robert Ringwald]

If I remember correctly, Turk Murphy had recorded his Ragtime album, "The Many Faces of Ragtime," for Atlantic.  Ahmet Ertegun was holding it.  Turk finally told him that if he was not going to release it, he'd take it back and take it somewhere else.  Then Atlantic did release it.  It is a really good album.  I don't know if it is out on CD.  
  

Soul Man
by Alex Abramovich
New York Times, November 27, 2011
Ahmet Ertegun was the first person to ask Ella Fitzgerald for her autograph, in 1935.
He lived long enough to party for days on end with Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson,
and died in 2006, after falling backstage at a Rolling Stones show on the Upper West
Side. It wasn't the prettiest, most dignified death. But Ertegun -- who appreciated
good jokes, bad women, booze, bad jokes and good women, in any given order -- would
have enjoyed the obituaries.
Ertegun was born in Istanbul, in 1923. His father, Mehmet Munir, was Ataturk's legal
adviser, a practicing Muslim who helped to build secular Turkey and became its ambassador
to France, the Court of St. James and the United States. Ertegun -- who'd fallen
in love with black music after seeing Duke Ellington's band perform in London, in
1933 -- grew up in Washington and, together with his older brother, Nesuhi, put on
a series of jam sessions and jazz concerts that were among the city's first integrated
events. He stayed on after his father's death, in 1944, studying philosophy at Georgetown
and hanging out at Waxie Maxie's record store. In 1947 he moved to New York and formed
Atlantic Records, with money from the family dentist.
Atlantic was scrappy (staffers pushed their desks aside when it came time to record),
classy (the musical director Jesse Stone had done arrangements for Chick Webb's band,
where Ella Fitzgerald got her start) and inventive (the engineer Tom Dowd had been
a junior physicist on the Manhattan Project), with an all-star roster that soon included
Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, Joe Turner, LaVern Baker, Clyde McPhatter and Professor
Longhair, as well as the Drifters, Clovers, Coasters and Chords. Ertegun had taste,
luck and timing -- and unlike other, more mercenary industry executives, he actually
liked (and even understood) the music he made. By the mid-50s, Atlantic had become
the premier rhythm and blues label. And when its co-founder, Herb Abramson, was called
up by the Army in 1953, Erte­gun drafted Jerry Wexler, who'd coined the term "rhythm
and blues" in the first place, to replace him as a partner. And, thanks in part to
Wexler's input -- and his work with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke
-- Atlantic became one of the very few independent record companies to survive and
thrive in the wake of the British Invasion.
This story is well worth telling, and it's been told quite well, in histories of
Atlantic by Charlie Gillett and by Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie; in a massive
coffee-table book assembled by and/or for Ertegun himself; and (most notably) in
a remarkable New Yorker profile by George W. S. Trow. The music writer Robert Greenfield
draws heavily on all these sources, and quite a few others, in "The Last Sultan."
But Greenfield's book, the first posthumous biography of Ertegun, is also the first
to bring Ertegun's story up to date, and put it in perspective. Given the charm and
joie de vivre that were Ertegun's most marked characteristics (and that also characterized
Greenfield's own, best book, "Bill Graham Presents"), the biography takes a few surprising
turns.
Greenfield spends nine chapters on Ertegun's early life and Atlantic's glorious opening
act: well-worn territory that he fleshes out and adds to. Take, for instance, the
story of Herb Abramson, who returned from the Army in 1955 and was eventually booted
from the label. According to Gillett, Abramson returned to find that "Jerry Wexler
was in his seat and couldn't be moved." According to Wade and Picardie, Abramson
-- whose wife, Miriam, ran Atlantic's day-to-day operations -- returned from Germany
with a girlfriend (or, as Wexler put it, "a Brunnhilde!"). In Greenfield's account,
Abramson returns with the girlfriend and a drug habit. ("'Herb was snorting cocaine,'
someone who knew Abramson well during this period would later confirm.") Greenfield
uncovers other unsavory details, many of them drawn from interviews with businessmen
who worked with Atlantic and Ertegun. The Atlantic files "had every disc jockey in
the United States's shoe size, hat size, preference in women and drugs of choice,"
one says. "It was a very dirty business, and the black side was particularly dirty."
As it happens, Ertegun had cleaner hands than many of his competitors, was better
at paying out royalties and tended to be loyal to his artists. By industry standards,
the ambassador's son was a prince. And yet he had his weaknesses, which Greenfield
-- who dedicates his book to Ertegun's widow, Mica, and sister, Selma Goksel -- isn't
shy about enumerating. Here's Ahmet, "lying beneath a glass coffee table" while a
call girl does "unspeakable things on the other side of the glass." There he is,
flicking cigarette ashes onto David Geffen's head, or replacing Jerry Wexler's passport
photograph "with that of a woman having sex with a donkey." "The Last Sultan" takes
its title from something one latter-day mistress -- "a striking 34-year-old blond
French dermatologist" -- tells the biographer: "Ahmet was the last sultan of Turkey,"
she explains. "A man of this dimension will never stay with one ­woman."
Some of this stuff is amusing. ("When Wexler presented his passport at the airport
in Paris," Greenfield writes, "the gendarme looked at the photo and then at Wexler
and then back at the photo again. Trying to be helpful, Wexler said, 'I used to have
a beard.'") Some of it is not. ("He was a misogynist," Laura Brani­gan's former manager
recalls. "He didn't have a lot of respect for women. He was sleeping with every artist
he could, including Laura.") Greenfield lets the chips fall where they may: despite
its dedication, this is not your run-of-the-mill music-biz hagiography. But because
Ertegun's life story follows the basic outlines of the industry he helped to create,
Greenfield's book does become a lot less interesting as it goes along.
In the later chapters, Greenfield describes Ertegun's move away from the black music
he loved and championed, toward white bands -- Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones
-- whose affinity for black music drew them to sign with Atlantic, and, finally,
toward Hootie and the Blowfish. Ertegun survives palace coups (one of which results
in Wexler's departure from the label), mergers and acquisitions, and cocaine-filled
nights at Studio 54. But the glorified accountants Greenfield debriefs fall flat
compared with the characters he's described in the book's opening pages.
By the end, Ertegun ends up with four palatial homes, custom-made Louis Vuitton cases
(for his collection of handmade shoes) and friendships with Donald Rumsfeld and Henry
Kissinger. His biographer ends up listing the "symptoms traditionally associated
with listeria" ("fever, muscle aches and nausea or diarrhea"), with which Ertegun
survived "a protracted bout." "Just like Herb Abramson, Jerry Wexler, David Geffen
and Jerry Greenberg," Greenfield writes, in a passage that epitomizes the book's
shift toward people most of us have never heard of (and wouldn't care to hear about
again), "Doug Morris was now someone with whom Ahmet had once worked at Atlantic.
They were now all gone, but he was still there. In the end, this was always what
Ahmet had cared about most."
This is a strange, sad, "Citizen Kane"-like slide for a man who never lacked for
company.
__________
Alex Abramovich is writing a history of rock 'n' roll.


--Bob Ringwald
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