When Marvin Gaye died in 1984, he left behind one of the great legacies in American music. More than a superb vocalist and subtle composer, he was a visionary who expressed the tenor of his times. Both radical and romantic, a self-taught singer with a flair for autobiographical revelation, he thrived on confession and loved candor. Marvin had the unique talent of turning the listener into a confidante, of making you feel his immediate presence. His aura combined spiritual and sensual essences. In his music, the combination worked wonders; in his personal life, the two strains clashed. He succeeded in translating his contradictions into complex and beautiful music.

I adored Marvin Gaye. As we worked on his life story together, I saw him as a man of quick wit, rare wit and light-hearted humor. His boyish charm and infectious smile were irresistible. His paradoxes were fascinating. In the middle of conversations, he’d stop to meditate or pray, his words turning into songs. As a collaborator, he was fabulous — right there, in the moment, an ingenious improviser and natural storyteller.

Marvin Pentz Gay, Jr. was born April 2, 1939, in Washington, D.C. (He added the “e” after entering show business.) His father was a charismatic storefront preacher, his mother a domestic worker. Family life was marked by friction. Marvin grew up singing in his daddy’s Holy Roller church, the place he said, “where I learned the essential joy of music.” After working with Bo Diddley, Gaye left high school to join the Moonglows, an important doo-wop group of the fifties. It was Harvey Fuqua, the group’s leader, who took Gaye to Detroit in the early sixties. There Marvin met Berry Gordy, who just started Motown, and married Berry’s sister Anna, a woman 18 years Gaye’s senior.

Emerging from a generation rooted in conformity, Gaye was a non-conformist, an anti-authoritarian artist — shy, ambitious, mellow but fearful, brooding and serious. He began as a session drummer but soon was singing. He fashioned himself a Sinatra-styled balladeer determined to buck the Motown machine. Yet his early attempts at Nat Cole-flavored material failed. Gordy couldn’t crack the adult market and Marvin crossed over the same bridge as all the other Motown acts — red-hot rhythm and blues. Motown’s committee of crack producers helped create a slew of major hits for Gaye. The title of the first, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” was blatantly self-descriptive.

Gaye’s sixties success centered on a series of brilliant singles supervised by various producers. Those songs established Marvin as a solo star. His work with Smokey Robinson (”Ain’t That Peculiar,” “I’ll Be Doggone”), Holland-Dozier-Holland (”How Sweet It Is,” “Can I Get A Witness”) and Mickey Stevenson (”Hitch Hike,” “Pride and Joy,” “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”) are among the crown jewels of early Motown. The productions explode with energy. Because of his flexibility and inherent musicality, Marvin was a producer’s dream. “You give Marvin material,” said Smokey, “and he’d improve, sculpt it, turn it into something bigger and better.”

His flexibility was also demonstrated as a duet partner. His most successful teaming was with Tammi Terrell, the standard against which all R&B duos are measured. As the country plunged into the Vietnam War, as race riots broke out across the land, the duets became escapes from reality. Marvin was a master of make-believe.

Meanwhile, his solo career found its greatest expression in the work of writer-producer Norman Whitfield. Both Gaye and Whitfield could be strong-willed and testy. But somehow the fiery blend of hostility and harmony came together in “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” Marvin’s bone-chilling rendition carries all the pathos and pain of epic opera. “That’s the Way Love Is” and “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby” are also splendid examples of the wonders of Whitfield-Gaye.

“His Eye Is On the Sparrow” is a rare and moving instance of Marvin singing a spiritual non-pop song in the sixties.

The sixties was a producer-driven decade. In the seventies, Gaye changed all that. Now he thought in terms of concept albums, none more breathtaking than What’s Going On, the suite that reinvented soul music. After nine years of watching other producers, Marvin was ready to produce himself. The opinions of Motown’s marketing men, convinced What’s Going On would fail, didn’t matter. “What mattered,” said Marvin, “was the message. For the first time, I felt like I had something to say.”

Released in 1971, the self-produced suite reflects a whirl of crosscurrents — silky rhythm-and-blues, string-laden pop, gospel sensibilities, free-form jazz. Tenorman Wild Bill Moore raged beneath the vocals with the fury of Pharaoh Sanders. Dave Van dePitte wrote and arranged the orchestrations; others helped Marvin write the songs; but in the end it is Gaye’s vision, Gaye’s passion, Gaye’s singular statement as an independent artist that creates this new aesthetic of American pop.

Marvin moved to Los Angeles in 1972 where he wrote his first score. Trouble Man was the film, its theme song an ironically autobiographical blues. (”I didn’t make it playing by the rules,” he sings. “Only three things that’s for sure — taxes, death, and trouble.”)

With few exceptions, the rest of the seventies was devoted to major suites. One exception is “You’re the Man,” a sparkling footnote to What’s Going On, written and produced by Marvin during President Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign. Another rare Gaye recording is “Where Are We Going?,” from his only session with producers Freddie Perren and Fonce Mizell. Heard [on The Very Best of Marvin Gaye (2001)] for the first time, Mavin’s version is the original to Donald Byrd’s, from the jazz trumpeter’s best-selling album Black Byrd. It has the sweet feeling of What’s Going On-light.

In 1973, Marvin finally answered What’s Going On with Let’s Get It On. Written in collaboration with Ed Townsend, the title song was an instant smash. The style is loose, funky and cavalier. Marvin basks in sensuous pleasures. He’s just met the young woman who would become his second wife, Janis Hunter, 18 years his junior. (Marvin and Anna wouldn’t divorce until 1977, by the time he and Janis had two children.) The suite is more than a celebration of sex. By the final chorus, Marvin seeks the spiritual, asking his lover is she understands what it means to be “sanctified.” “Distant Lover” stands as a towering ballad in the history of soul.

In the middle of the decade Marvin moved into his custom-built studio in the heart of Hollywood. In spite of the luxury of the new facility, though, Gaye suffered writer’s block. It took Leon Ware, a vastly underrated singer-songwriter, to break the block. The result was Ware’s scintillating production, I Want You. The title track is among Gaye’s most extravagant statements on physical longing, the album an euphoric and gorgeous piece of harmonic hedonism.

In 1977, Marvin needed a hit. The age of disco was in full flower. “Motown was screaming disco at me,” Gaye told me, “but I couldn’t be bothered.” Never one to chase fashions, Marvin was reluctant to concoct anything that remotely smacked of trendy dance music. Yet “Got To Give It Up” became a tremendous dance hit — #1 R&B, #1 Pop — and an eccentric success; it survives as a brief moment of levity during a period of Gaye’s personal despair.

Marvin and Anna finally divorced. Settlement negotiations were brutal. Here, My Dear, in 1979, documents that marriage and remains the most personal and intriguing of the great Gaye suites of the seventies. A meditation on emotional turmoil, “Anger” is a highlight from that monumental work.

“Ego Tripping Out” was the single selected from Love Man, a blatantly commercial album Marvin decided to shelve. The song can be seen as Gaye-styled rap, a testimony to the crippling properties of ego. It also denounces the drugs that are slowly killing him. “The toot and the smoke,” he sings on the concluding vamp, referring to cocaine and marijuana, “won’t fulfill the need.”

“Praise” is from Gaye’s final Motown album, In Our Lifetime, a series of wildly divergent musical essays, which, at their core, are unrelentingly dark. By then Marvin’s world was collapsing — his second marriage fell apart, his drug addiction flared out of control, the IRS seized his property. He moved from Los Angeles to Hawaii to London to Ostend, Belgium. With a contract from Columbia Records, he fashioned a dramatic comeback.

“Sexual Healing” remains an unanswered prayer. It is everything Marvin wanted, everything he needed, the reconciliation of his deeply divided soul. “Sexual Healing” meant serenity. When he recorded the song in Belgium in 1982, he was hopeful that such serenity was possible. It wasn’t meant to be.

In the end, despite a triumphant return to the U.S. on the heels of “Sexual Healing,” Marvin would not find happiness. His death at the hands of his father on April 1, 1984 tragically resolved a life-long struggle between the two men. Their relationship was marred by fear, jealousy, chemical abuse and fierce self-destructiveness. Their venomous antipathy was deeper than either man had understood.

A dozen years after his demise, Marvin’s contradictions remain. Discord and harmony echo through Marvin’s music like sweet incantations. When Gaye sings, the demons tyrannizing his soul are brought under control and made to conform to his elevated code of beauty. He achieves what Oscar Wilde called a “spiritualizing of the senses.” He endures; he remains an astounding artist, an inspiring poet, a man whose fabulous talents and all-too-human flaws worked together for the sake of song. The fact that Marvin lives on, now more than ever, is cause for celebration.

–
David Ritz co-wrote “Sexual Healing” and authored Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye as well as bios of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Smokey Robinson, Etta James and the Neville Brothers.

Ahmet Ertegun (1923-2006)

The Greatest Record Man Of All Time
by Robert Greenfield

“I think it’s better to burn out than to fade away… it’s better to live out your days being very, very active — even if it destroys you — than to quietly… disappear…. At my age, why do you think I’m still here struggling with all the problems of this company — because I don’t want to fade away.”
–Ahmet Ertegun

More than most in the $5 billion-a-year global industry he helped build from scratch, Ahmet Ertegun loved the rhythm and the blues. He loved the rock and the roll, jump and swing, and all forms of jazz. More than anything, he loved the high life and the low. When he died at the age of eighty-three on December 14th, about six weeks after injuring himself in a backstage fall at a Rolling Stones concert at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, the world lost not only the greatest “record man” who ever lived but also a unique individual whose personal and professional life comprised the history of popular music in America over the past seventy years. On every level, the story of that life is just as rich, varied and exotic as the music that Ahmet brought the world through Atlantic Records, the company he founded in 1947 and was still running at the time of his death.

Born in Istanbul on july 31st, 1923, Ahmet Ertegun might never have come to America, which he later called “the land of cowboys, Indians, Chicago gangsters, beautiful brown-skinned women and jazz,” if the Ottoman Empire had not suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Allies during World War I. Occupied by foreign forces, the empire began crumbling in the face of an all-out rebellion led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former army major general who would become the father of modern Turkey.

In 1920, Ahmet’s father, Mehmet Munir (he added the surname Ertegun in 1936), a graduate of Istanbul University whose father was a civil servant and whose mother was the daughter of a Sufi sheik, was sent by the sultan to persuade Ataturk to lay down his arms. Switching sides, Mehmet decided instead to become Ataturk’s legal adviser. Two years later, Mehmet was sent to the international conference at which the Treaty of Lausanne was signed on July 24th, 1923, setting the borders of modern Turkey and extending diplomatic recognition to the new republic.

In 1925, Mehmet was named minister to Switzerland and moved with his wife, Hayrunisa; his two sons, Nesuhi and Ahmet; and his daughter, Selma, to Bern. In rapid succession, Mehmet served as ambassador to France (where Ahmet first learned to speak French, the traditional language of the court in Turkey) and then to the Court of St. James (where Ahmet was taught English, which he spoke with a French accent, by a governess who had worked at Buckingham Palace).

In 1932, when Ahmet was nine, his older brother took him to see Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington at the London Palladium. “I had never really seen black people,” Ahmet recalled, “and I had never heard anything as glorious as those beautiful musicians wearing white tails, playing these incredibly gleaming horns.” Two years later, Ahmet was delighted to learn his father had been posted to Washington to serve as Turkey’s first ambassador to the United States during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.

Expecting to be thrust into an America he had only experienced through music, Ahmet was sent instead to the Landon School, an all-boys institution run like a British public school. He then attended St. Albans, whose graduates include Al Gore and George H.W. Bush’s father, Prescott. However, as Ahmet would later note, “I got my real education at the Howard.” Located in the heart of the black district, the Howard was the nation’s first theater built for black audiences and entertainers. At the Howard, the greatest stars of the day – Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton – performed. “As I grew up,” Ahmet would later say, “I began to discover a little bit about the situation of black people in America and experienced an immediate empathy with the victims of such senseless discrimination. Because although the Turks were never slaves, they were regarded as enemies within Europe because of their Muslim beliefs.”

Even as a boy, Ahmet wanted to make records. When he was fourteen, his mother bought him a toy record-cutting machine. Taking an instrumental version of Cootie Williams doing “West End Blues,” Ahmet put it on a Magnavox record player, sang lyrics he had written into a microphone and then amazed his friends by playing the acetate without telling them he was singing. In 1940, the year he enrolled in St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, Ahmet and his brother put on Washington’s first integrated concert at the only venue that would allow black and white musicians to play on the same stage before a mixed audience: the Jewish Community Center.

On Sunday afternoons, the brothers turned the Turkish Embassy into an open house where visiting jazz musicians would jam together in a huge parlor. According to Ahmet, his father soon began receiving letters from outraged Southern senators, saying, “It has been brought to my attention, sir, that a person of color was seen entering your house by the front door. I have to inform you that in our country, this is not a practice to be encouraged.” Mehmet responded by writing, “In my home, friends enter by the front door – however, we can arrange for you to enter from the back.”

When Mehmet died in 1944, at the age of sixty-one, the family left the embassy. Ahmet and Nesuhi were forced to sell their collection of more than 20,000 records, which they had amassed by going door-to-door in the ghetto and hanging out in black record shops. Rather than return to Turkey to enter the diplomatic corps, the brothers decided to stay in America. Moving into an apartment near the embassy, Ahmet began doing post-graduate work in medieval philosophy at Georgetown University, but he spent most of his time at “Waxie Maxie” Silverman’s Quality Music Shop, where he learned the retail end of the record business firsthand.

In 1946, Ahmet and his friends Herb and Miriam Abramson talked Waxie Maxie into putting up the money to start two labels: the gospel-based Jubilee, and Quality, which focused on jazz. After their first few records went nowhere, Waxie Maxie decided he wanted out. Somehow, Ahmet persuaded Dr. Vahdi Sabit, a Turkish dentist who had been a longtime family friend, to mortgage his home and loan Ahmet $10,000 to start his own label in New York. In 1947, Atlantic Records was born.

The rise of independent record companies like Chess, King, Vee-Jay, Modern, Kent, Savoy and Roulette in America after World War II came about because of several factors. The wartime rationing of shellac, a key ingredient in the manufacture of records, had forced the major labels to drop most of their “race music” and country & western artists to concentrate on the mainstream audience. The postwar boom in the economy put money into the hands of working people, many of them black. And then there was payola, a practice that enabled even the smallest label to get its records played on the radio – if it was willing to pay for it.

Atlantic set up shop in a tiny suite on the ground floor of the broken-down Jefferson Hotel on 56th Street in Manhattan. From the start, Ahmet had a vision of what he wanted to put out on Atlantic. “Here’s the sort of record we need to make,” he once said. “There’s a black man living in the outskirts of Opelousas, Louisiana. He works hard for his money; he has to be tight with a dollar. One morning he hears a song on the radio. It’s urgent, bluesy, authentic and irresistible. He can’t live without this record. He drops everything, jumps in his pickup and drives twenty-five miles to the first record store he finds. If we can make that kind of music, we can make it in the business.”

The reason for the demand was simple. America was still a racially divided nation. In even so sophisticated a city as New York, as Ahmet would later recall, “Harlem folks couldn’t go downtown to the Broadway theaters. They weren’t even welcome on 52nd Street, where the big performers were black. Black people had to find entertainment in their homes – the record was it.”

Ahmet’s first major signing was the singer Ruth Brown, whom he had seen perform at the Crystal Caverns club in Washington. On her way to New York to perform at the Apollo Theater in October 1948, Brown was in a car accident and broke both her legs. On January 12th, 1949, Ahmet brought her a contract to sign while she lay in bed. He then handed her a book on how to sight-read and a large tablet on which she could scribble lyrics while she recovered. Atlantic paid the portion of her hospital bill not covered by insurance.

When Ahmet had first seen Brown perform, her biggest number was “A-You’re Adorable,” a Perry Como song that was completely mainstream. As he did with so many black artists who had lost touch with their own musical roots, Ahmet pushed Brown toward a funkier and more down-home sound. In October 1950, she had a Number One R&B hit with “Teardrops From My Eyes.” In 1953, she recorded “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” with Ray Charles directing her backing band. The song, which Ahmet had her do at four different speeds until he found the one he liked, stayed at Number One on the R&B charts for five weeks and helped put the label on solid ground. By then, many people were calling Atlantic “The House That Ruth Built.”

Because music publishers were not eager, as Ahmet said, to provide material to “a hole-in-the-wall company called Atlantic,” he began writing songs himself. In a recording booth located in a Times Square arcade, he would make a vinyl demo of a song that he would then play for the artist in the studio. Using the pseudonym “Nugetre,” his last name spelled backward, so he would not embarrass his family, Ahmet wrote “Don’t You Know I Love You” and “Fool, Fool, Fool,” which were hits for the Clovers in 1951.

One Friday during the noon show at the Apollo Theater, Ahmet saw Big Joe Turner, who was already thought to be past his prime and had recently been dropped from Columbia, struggling as the vocalist with the Count Basie Orchestra. After the show, Ahmet looked everywhere for Turner only to find him drowning his sorrows in a nearby bar. Telling Turner he was the greatest blues singer ever, Ahmet said that all he needed was new material and persuaded him to sign with Atlantic. He then wrote “Chains of Love” for Turner, which went to Number Two on the R&B charts.

In 1952, Ahmet signed the artist who would come to define Atlantic: Ray Charles. Up to that point, Charles had been playing in the smooth style of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown, and had recorded a minor hit called “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand” for Swingtime. Wanting to push Charles toward a grittier sound, Ahmet wrote two songs for him, “Heartbreaker” and “Mess Around.” Although the session is portrayed in a different manner in Taylor Hackford’s 2004 film biography, Ray, Charles had never before played boogie-woogie piano. As Ahmet began explaining the sound he wanted, Charles suddenly began, in Ahmet’s words, “to play the most incredible example of that style of piano playing I’ve ever heard. It was like witnessing Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious in action – as if this great artist had somehow plugged in and become a channel for a whole culture that just came pouring through him.”

When the Army called Herb Abramson up in 1953 to serve in Germany during the Korean War, Ahmet brought in the Billboard writer who six years earlier had coined the term “rhythm & blues.” Jerry Wexler, an intense, brilliant former street kid from Manhattan’s Washington Heights section, became a partner in Atlantic Records for $2,063.25. Ahmet took Wexler’s money and bought him a green Cadillac El Dorado, the only kind of car in which a self-respecting record man could then be seen. Ahmet, who had always been cooler than cool, was now working alongside someone who generated heat like a steel-mill blast furnace. The two made an incredible pair.

The ultimate story of their time together, which both men loved to tell, concerned the night in New Orleans when they went to find an unknown genius named Professor Longhair who was playing in a joint across the river, where no taxi driver would take them. Their cabbie dropped them off in the middle of a field. After walking a mile in darkness, they saw a brightly lit house in the middle of town so full of people that they seemed to be falling out of the windows as music blared. Talking their way past the guy at the door, who assumed they were cops, the pair made their way inside. Out came Professor Longhair, who played a piano with an attached drumhead that he would hit with his right foot. As people danced, Ahmet and Jerry could barely contain themselves. An utterly primitive, completely original artist was making a kind of music they had never heard before. Rushing up to Longhair after his set was over, they told him just how much they wanted to sign him to Atlantic. “I’m terribly sorry,” said Longhair. “I signed with Mercury last week.” In Ahmet’s version of the story, the pianist then added, “But I signed with them as Roeland Byrd. With you, I can be Professor Longhair.”

By the time Herb Abramson returned from the Army in 1955, Jerry Wexler had physically and psychically taken over his role at the company. Rather than break up their studio partnership, Ahmet put Abramson in charge of a subsidiary label, Atco, and gave him the Coasters and a young piano player named Bobby Darin to work with. By then, Atlantic had moved to a brownstone at 234 West 56th Street. Pushing back the desks at night, Ahmet and Jerry would record in a room with a creaking floor, a sloping ceiling with a skylight in the middle and a young genius named Tom Dowd, who was studying nuclear physics, behind the board. Using the third eight-track recording machine ever made, for which he invented faders to replace the knobs, Dowd recorded “Save the Last Dance for Me” by the Drifters.

During this period, those in charge of Atlantic began to realize that their target audience was no longer rural and black. Rather, it was teenage and white. The message had come through loud and clear for the first time in 1954, when Big Joe Turner’s version of Jesse Stone’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” was covered initially by Bill Haley & His Comets and then Elvis Presley. In a 1954 essay in Cashbox magazine, Ahmet and Wexler wrote that the blues would have to change to meet the tastes of the bobby-soxers who were looking to find their own sound. What Jerry Wexler chose to call “cat music” would be “up-to-date blues with a beat and infectious catch phrases and danceable rhythms…. It has to have a message for the sharp youngsters who dig it.” To put it another way, the blues had a baby, and they called it rock & roll.

In 1955, Nesuhi, who had married and moved to Los Angeles after his studies for a Ph.D. in philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris were interrupted by World War II, announced he was going to work for Imperial Records, the label on which Fats Domino recorded. Ahmet could not bear the thought of his brother laboring for a competitor and persuaded him to come back to New York to head Atlantic’s jazz division. Within a year, Nesuhi had signed and recorded the Modern Jazz Quartet and jazz bassist Charles Mingus.

Nesuhi also brought Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had written and produced “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” and “Riot in Cell Block #9″ for the Robins on Spark Records. Although the practice was then unheard of in the industry, Ahmet signed them to work as independent producers. In 1957, after two of the Robins left Spark to form the Coasters on Atlantic, Leiber and Stoller’s “Searchin’ ” and “Young Blood” became a huge two-sided hit for the label.

Having failed to produce a hit with Bobby Darin, and feeling as though his time at Atlantic had come to an end, Herb Abramson left the company in 1958. Cash-poor, Ahmet and Wexler managed to raise enough money to buy out Vahdi Sabit. In return for his $10,000 investment in Atlantic, he received between $2.5 million and $3 million, quit dentistry and moved to the South of France. Ahmet and Jerry also bought out Miriam Abramson, thereby making themselves and Nesuhi the sole owners of Atlantic Records.

When Ahmet learned that Bobby Darin was thinking about leaving the label, he took him into the studio in May 1958 and cut “Splish Splash” and “Queen of the Hop,” both of which became big hits because Ahmet wanted Darin to aim his music squarely at the kids who watched American Bandstand on TV each day. Ahmet’s great success with Darin led him to Los Angeles, where he began looking for lucrative pop acts. Concerning the early years at Atlantic, Wexler would later write, “We weren’t looking for canonization; we lusted for hits. Hits were the cash flow, the lifeblood, the heavenly ichor – the wherewithal of survival.” Nonetheless, he found it hard to adjust to the company’s new direction. “As Ahmet grew older,” Wexler wrote, “he grew less judgmental and more interested in a wide range of commercial forms, especially white rock & roll. I stayed with what I knew and loved.”

With money now flowing into the Atlantic coffers, Ahmet was once again living the kind of life he had first learned to love while growing up, with “chauffeured cars, servants, cooks and per diem” in embassies all over the world. In a striking photograph from that era, Ahmet, resplendent in a dark suit with a white silk tie and matching pocket square, can be seen doing some sort of dance step with a gorgeous fashion model named Rosalie Calvert. Both hold drinks in their hands.

During this period, Ahmet hit upon the idea of hiring a bus, which he equipped with a bar so he and all his friends could drink as they went from club to club together. On the rare occasions when Ahmet found himself alone at the end of an evening, he would say, “Let’s go home,” and the driver would take him to the very stylish El Morocco (known as “Elmer’s” to its regulars) on 54th Street for more drinks and more fun.

After cutting the classic “What’d I Say” in 1959, Ray Charles chose to leave Atlantic without giving Ahmet and Jerry a chance to match the offer that ABC-Paramount had made him. Although Ahmet was personally devastated by the loss of someone he considered a friend, he would later note that the relationship between a label and an artist was like a marriage. At the start, there was always a great deal of excitement. Eventually, the artist found someone richer or the label found someone younger. Although Wexler feared the company might not survive, Ahmet said, “Somehow, I wasn’t that concerned. I always figured that we were going to make another hit…. New artists somehow magically appear.”

In the world in which Ahmet Ertegun now lived, the change in sensibility that marked the beginning of the Sixties can best be understood by the fact that the fabled El Morocco was suddenly dead and the place to see and be seen was the Peppermint Lounge, an impossibly crowded dance club on 54th Street, where Ahmet could often be found doing the twist alongside the duke of Marlborough, Jackie Kennedy and Truman Capote.

One night, some friends brought Ahmet to dinner with a woman named Ioana Maria Banu. Called Mica by all who know her, she was, in Ahmet’s words, “a natural aristocrat.” Born in Romania to a family of wealthy landowners, Mica had been forced to flee the country after the communist takeover in 1947. With her husband, an older man who had worked for the royal household, she moved to Canada, where for eight years they ran a chicken farm. Although Mica was still married when she met Ahmet, and he had only recently separated from his first wife, the attraction between them was immediate and intense. Ahmet pursued Mica as only he could. During the time they were courting, he once hid a five-piece band that played “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in the bathroom of her suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal. The two were married on April 6th, 1961.

In a nation reinvigorated by President John F. Kennedy’s promise of a “New Frontier,” civil rights became the predominant issue. “Soul lyrics, soul music,” Ahmet would later say, “came at about the same time as the civil rights movement, and it’s very possible that one influenced the other.” In partnership with Stax/Volt, Atlantic began releasing music recorded by Tom Dowd and Jerry Wexler in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In 1962, Atlantic released “These Arms of Mine,” the first hit single by Otis Redding, who, as Ahmet would later recall, “used to call me ‘Omelette,’ but not as a nickname – he thought at first that this actually was my name.” During this era, Atlantic had big hits by the Mar-Keys, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, Percy Sledge, and Joe Tex. In 1967, Wexler took Aretha Franklin into a studio in Muscle Shoals to record “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” While his partner was turning out the greatest soul music ever recorded, Ahmet continued to pursue white rock acts for the label.

Ahmet had first met Sonny Bono through Phil Spector, who had come and gone at Atlantic without producing any major hits. Bono had actually worked as Ahmet’s assistant on recording sessions for the Righteous Brothers, the progenitors of “blue-eyed soul.” When Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, then managing Sonny and Cher, called to say the pair was not happy at Warner Bros., Ahmet signed them to Atco. In 1965, “I Got You Babe” was, as Ahmet would later recall, “a nationwide hit and an international hit – I mean, like nothing we had ever experienced before.”

Greene and Stone then contacted Wexler about another band they had found in Los Angeles. Wexler, who hated dealing with the new breed of stoned-out, longhaired, hippie musicians whom he called “the rockoids,” turned the project over to Ahmet. The band was Buffalo Springfield, and Ahmet was knocked over by the demo of Neil Young’s “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong.” Sitting down on the floor in Los Angeles with Young, Stephen Stills, Richie Furay, Dewey Martin and Bruce Palmer, Ahmet pitched them on going with a record company that would understand their music. “I think they liked the fact that I sat down on the floor,” Ahmet would later tell Young biographer Jimmy McDonough. “When I like an artist, I treat them like a star, and to me these guys were exceptional stars. I thought they were going to be a revolutionary kind of group. It was fantastic to have three great guitar players who were also three outstanding lead singers.” Or, as Young would tell the audience as he was being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, “When Ahmet walked into the room, you got good.”

Much to Ahmet’s dismay, Buffalo Springfield broke up after making only two albums. “I think it was one of the few times I cried,” Ahmet told McDonough, “because I just thought that I had the historic group.”

Ahmet, who had been blessed with supreme self-confidence, never worried about failure. The same could not be said about Wexler, who worried about everything, most especially the future of Atlantic Records. By 1967, Vee-Jay had collapsed, and Chess was failing. Wexler told Ahmet and Nesuhi that he wanted to sell Atlantic Records to the highest bidder. When Nesuhi sided with Wexler, Ahmet had no choice but to comply. Atlantic Records was sold in October 1967 to Warner-Seven Arts for $17.5 million, split among Ahmet, Nesuhi and Wexler.

“I didn’t want to sell the company,” Ahmet would later say. “The company was my idea, it was my brainchild, and we were doing well. I saw no reason to think that disaster was imminent. However, they were so insistent on selling, I really didn’t have an option.” In retrospect, with the value of Atlantic Records today estimated between $2 billion and $4 billion, the deal has come to be viewed as somewhat of a catastrophe. Yet Ahmet himself never blamed Wexler for urging him to do it, saying, “I’m thankful for what I’ve got. I’ve lived very well all my life, even when I had no money, and there’s very little I can’t afford.”

In 1969, Warner-Seven Arts was acquired by Kinney National Service, a conglomerate of parking lots, funeral parlors and rental cars, whose chairman, Steve Ross, knew virtually nothing about music. Ahmet announced that he, Nesuhi and Wexler would leave the company once their contracts expired. Faced with the loss of Atlantic’s entire management team, Ross took Ahmet to dinner at 21 in New York along with Warner CEO Ted Ashley. When Ross promised he would give Ahmet anything he wanted without interfering in the day-to-day operations at Atlantic, Ahmet negotiated a new deal for himself, Nesuhi and Wexler. Ross would later claim this was one of the luckiest days of his life.

With the era of the small independent label now officially over, rock & roll was big business. Because Ahmet Ertegun was smart enough to understand he would need corporate money to compete in this new industry, he was able to seduce and then sign the world’s greatest rock & roll band.

In 1970, the Rolling Stones’ onerous long-term deal with Decca finally expired. Intent on landing the band, Ahmet flew to Los Angeles to meet with Mick Jagger at the Whisky a Go Go, where Chuck Berry was performing. Before he got there, Ahmet dined with radio programmer Bill Drake, who challenged him to a drinking contest. Both men chugged several bourbons and then enjoyed a dinner that included some expensive wine and more bourbon. Already jet-lagged, Ahmet dragged himself into the Whisky. When Mick arrived, they drank several toasts. As Mick brought up the Stones’ new recording contract, Ahmet’s head sagged forward and he fell asleep at the table. “I couldn’t keep my eyes open,” he told Vanity Fair in 1998. “Mick thought it was very funny.”

While Mick may have been charmed, the deal was far from closed. In London, Ahmet phoned Jagger to say it was time to sit down and make a deal. Mick replied he would be more than happy to do just that after he spoke to Clive Davis at Columbia. Stunned, Ahmet hung up the phone. As he would later recall, “Whenever I saw Mick with someone else, my heart sank. It was a painful, ecstatic courtship.” Picking the phone back up, Ahmet called Jagger and said that while he completely understood his talking to Clive, he could only sign one major act this year and unless he got an answer in a hurry, it was going to be Paul Revere and the Raiders. Then he hung up. For the next forty-five minutes, the phone rang constantly. Ahmet never picked it up. Not long after, the Rolling Stones joined Atlantic.

Landing the Stones confirmed that Atlantic was now the pre-eminent record label in America. Ahmet was so close to Jagger that he had advised him to drop Marianne Faithfull as his girlfriend, warning that her overwhelming drug habit could ruin everything for them both. Shortly after, Mick married the lovely Bianca Perez Morena de Macias in St. Tropez, France. Nor was Ahmet shy about offering musical advice to the Stones. Andy Johns, then twenty years old, was sitting at the board at Olympic Studios in London, having some trouble mixing “Bitch” for Sticky Fingers, when Ahmet sat down in the control room. “Hey, kid!” Ertegun said to Johns, who had no idea who he was. “What you oughta do is add a little bottom to the guitars and turn the bass up.” Johns did as he was told and, as he says, “Bingo! The thing jelled.” After Ertegun left, Johns turned to Keith Richards and said, “Who the f*** was 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.”

Ahmet trumped everything he had already done for the Stones by throwing them a party on the roof of New York’s St. Regis Hotel to celebrate the end of their triumphant 1972 tour of America. The guest list included Tennessee Williams, Bob Dylan, Huntington Hartford, Oscar and Françoise de la Renta, and a host of titled nobles, with entertainment by Count Basie and Muddy Waters. Culturally, it was a major step in crossing over what had formerly been outlaw music into the mainstream.

On May 3rd, 1975, Jerry Wexler, feeling as though he was no longer involved in decision making at the label, wrote a letter to Ahmet in which he stated, “Under no circumstances, Ahmet, can I be your employee. That’s the bottom line.” Although Ahmet protested, “Man, you can’t quit. It’s unthinkable,” the greatest team in the history of the record business split after twenty-two incredible years. In 1978, Wexler complained to New Yorker writer George W.S. Trow that he never saw his old pal anymore, stating, “Ahmet sees only two kinds of people – social people and morons. And I ain’t either one.” Nonetheless, when Wexler wrote his autobiography, Rhythm and the Blues, in 1993, he dedicated the book to Ahmet Ertegun.

In 1983, after being approached with the idea of doing a television show called “The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” Ahmet contacted Rolling Stone founder and editor Jann Wenner, Jerry Wexler, record executives Bob Krasnow and Seymour Stein, and music-business lawyer Allen Grubman with the idea of actually establishing an institution to honor the greatest artists, producers and record executives in the field. Going from city to city, they heard a variety of presentations before deciding on Cleveland as the physical home for the building, which Ahmet insisted be designed by famed architect I.M. Pei. The first Hall of Fame class – which included Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown and Chuck Berry – was inducted in 1986; the museum opened nine years later. “Ahmet was the guiding moral aesthetic sensibility and consciousness of this thing,” recalls Wenner. “In the end, it was always, ‘What does Ahmet think?’ because Ahmet had the vision. Everyone deferred to Ahmet’s taste, his judgment, his knowledge. I don’t think he consciously thought this through, but he was building an institution to something that he had built. And really memorializing the history of an art form which in great part was his doing.” Ahmet Ertegun himself was inducted into the Hall in 1987. The main exhibition space at the museum bears his name.

In 1988, Atlantic Records celebrated its fortieth anniversary with a gala concert at Madison Square Garden, presenting a marathon twelve-hour show that featured, among many others, a Led Zeppelin reunion, Yes, the Coasters and the Bee Gees. Shortly before the show, Atlantic finally came to terms with Ruth Brown, who had waged a long, protracted and very public campaign on behalf of herself and other artists who had been on the label’s early roster. Atlantic agreed to waive all unrecouped costs charged to their royalty accounts and to pay twenty years of back royalties. Atlantic also agreed to begin limited audits on behalf of twenty-eight additional pioneer artists and contributed nearly $2 million to fund the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, which then pressured other labels to bring about royalty reform and gave money to needy musicians. Of all the companies and record men who had been in business back then, only Ahmet and Atlantic were still around.

At an age when most of the others with whom he’d started in the record business had long since retired, Ahmet was still putting out hits by artists such as Debbie Gibson, Twisted Sister, AC/DC, Rush and Skid Row. When Phil Collins, whom Ahmet considered one of the most impressive artists he’d ever known, played “In the Air Tonight” for him for the first time, Ahmet told Collins that if he wanted it to be a single, he would have to put extra drums on it.

“Labels and artists are never going to get along, because they think we’re brats, and we think they just haven’t smoked enough,” Tori Amos, another artist Ahmet championed when he was already old enough to be her grandfather, told Vanity Fair. “But with Ahmet you know he’s smoked more than you ever did.” She noted that although Ahmet was then seventy-four years old, she could not keep up with him on the dance floor. In 1997, the Atlantic Group, consisting of Atlantic, Rhino and Curb Records, was the number-one label in America, with annual global sales rising to $750 million.

Ahmet began cutting back on his daily corporate duties in 1996. In 1997, he suffered a serious bout of pneumonia. As the result of a shattered pelvis and three separate hip operations, he walked with a cane. Always on the go, he continued to live in unsurpassed style. He and Mica shared a townhouse on 81st Street in Manhattan, an apartment in Paris, a country home in Southampton, New York – with a living room he had demanded be enlarged so that there would be room for an orchestra – and a retreat in Bodrum, Turkey, built with ancient stones from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. His homes were filled with works by Matisse, Magritte, Hockney and Picasso.

In 2001, at the age of seventy-seven, Ahmet produced a session by saxophonist James Carter in Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, a club so small that a mobile recording studio had to be set up outside. Although it was 110 degrees inside the club, Ahmet, clad in a long wool sport coat, a crisp white shirt without a tie and pressed light tan pants, looked as cool as a cucumber as he ran back and forth from the mobile unit to the stage. Calling the songs, asking players to sit out for a number, telling Aretha Franklin to sing the blues on this one, Ahmet ran the session just as he had done for more than fifty years. The next day, he hosted a lunch for the singer Anita Baker, Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson. That night, Ahmet went right back to the club and did it all over again.

Unlike so many who made it big in the music business only to cash out by selling the companies they had infused with their own lifeblood, Ahmet held fast to the tiller. Until the end of his life, he was still in charge of what he had built from the ground up. That he died after falling backstage at a show by a band whom he truly loved is an ending too perfect for any self-respecting Hollywood screenwriter to have written. A year before he died, Ahmet told an interviewer how he’d like to be remembered: “I did a little bit to raise the dignity and recognition of the greatness of African-American music.”

Although the music business that Ahmet helped create has completely changed, its success still comes down to the quality of a song that people want to hear again so badly that they will happily pay for the privilege. Better than anyone, Ahmet Ertegun understood that need, having experienced it himself from the time he was a child.

And while the fabulous manner in which he chose to live caused all those with whom he came into contact to love him madly, the real reason Ahmet will be remembered is because by dedicating his life to rhythm and blues, rock and roll, jump and swing, and every form of jazz, from Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner and Ray Charles to the Drifters and Bobby Darin to Buffalo Springfield, Cream, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Phil Collins, Tori Amos, Kid Rock, and Gnarls Barkley, Ahmet Ertegun gave people all over the world, many of whom still do not know his name, the soundtrack of their lives.

–Rolling Stone issue 1018, January 25, 2007M

Editor’s Note: This article has been slightly edited to remove explicit language. The content has not been modified in any other way.

Ahmet Ertegun once told graduates of Berklee College of Music in Boston that he loved jazz, blues and hanging out. From the start, Ertegun devoted his career to what he loved. His incredible life is fully explored in AMERICAN MASTERS Atlantic Records: The House That Ahmet Built. Below are some highlights from Atlantic Records and Ahmet Ertegun:

July 31, 1923

Born in Istanbul, Turkey. Son of Turkish diplomat Mehmet Munir Ertegun and Hayrunisa Rustem.

Early years

Raised at embassies in Switzerland, France and England.

1932

Older brother Nesuhi takes Ertegun to see Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington at the Palladium in London.

1934

Moves with family to Washington, D.C., when his father becomes Turkish ambassador to the U.S.

1937

At age 14, Ertegun’s mother buys him a record cutting machine. Taking a Cootie Williams instrumental, “West End Blues,” he writes lyrics to it. With the instrumental playing on a record player he sings lyrics into the microphone as the record plays.

1944

Graduates from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. Goes on to graduate studies in philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Father dies, is buried at Arlington National Cemetery and, in 1946, his remains are transported back to Turkey on the USS Missouri.

1947

Co-founds Atlantic Records in New York City with friend and jazz fan Herb Abramson (a dental student and A&R man for National Records) and a $10,000 loan from Ertegun’s family dentist. They pick the name after hearing of a label called Pacific Jazz. Atlantic’s first office is in the condemned Jefferson Hotel on 56th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. The living room is used as the office.

1948

First Atlantic records released.

Late 1940s

Travels to New Orleans to scout Professor Longhair, which convinces the label to incorporate New Orleans sound in recordings. The more sophisticated and jazz-oriented session men are unable to recreate the precise sound, but in the process create the “Atlantic Sound,” which supports all the label’s singers with boogie-based, sax-lead band arrangements that are an internal part of the song.

1949

“Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” by Stick McGhee is Atlantic’s first major hit record.

Signs and produces Ray Charles, Professor Longhair, the Clovers, Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, the Drifters, and many others. Atlantic becomes the country’s preeminent R&B label.

Songwriting credits include Ben E. King’s “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied);” The Clovers’ “Don’t You Know I Love You;” “Fool, Fool, Fool,” and “Lovey Dovey;” Big Joe Turner’s “Chains of Love;” “Sweet Sixteen;” and “Midnight Special Train.”

1951

Jerry Wexler joins Atlantic as a partner, paying $2063.25 for a 13 percent share.

1953

Ray Charles records a song that marks a stylistic departure, “Mess Around,” written by Ertegun under the name Nugetre.

1955

Atlantic offers Colonel Tom Parker $25,000 for Elvis Presley’s contract but loses out to RCA.

1956

Nesuhi Ertegun joins Atlantic. He initially develops Atlantic’s album department and builds up the label’s extensive jazz catalog, producing John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

1958

Begins to produce string of hits for Bobby Darin, including “Splish Splash” and “Mack the Knife.”

1959

Darin earns two Grammy Awards, Atlantic’s first.

1961

Marries Ioana Maria Banu. Known as Mica, she becomes a prominent interior designer.

1965

Ertegun moves Atlantic further into pop world by signing Sonny & Cher.

1960s

Atlantic dominates soul music revolution with Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Booker T. and the MG’s, Sam and Dave, Clarence Carter, King Curtis, and many others.

Ushers in groundbreaking period in history of white rock and roll, signing Buffalo Springfield, Eric Clapton & Cream, The Rascals, The Bee Gees, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Crosby Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young), and Blind Faith before the decade is out.

1967

Ertegun and Atlantic partners sell label to Warner-Seven Arts. Ertegun retains creative control.

1968

Wexler signs Led Zeppelin (consisting of ex-Yardbird and session mainstay Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones) to Atlantic.

1971

Signs the Rolling Stones, an association that lasts 14 years.

Co-founds Cosmos soccer team in New York and serves as president of the club.

1972

Signs Bette Midler.

1973

Brings Genesis to Atlantic.

1974

Signs Manhattan Transfer.

Elevated from president to become first chairman/CEO of Atlantic.

1983

With Jann Wenner, co-founds Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation. Named chairman.

1987

Inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

1991

Receives Honorary Doctorate from Berklee College of Music.

1993

Receives Trustees Award from National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences.

1994

Alaska-born vocalist Jewel releases her first Atlantic album, Pieces of You.

Atlantic releases an album with Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti: The Three Tenors in Concert 1994.

1995

Main exhibition hall at new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland is named for Ahmet Ertegun.

1998

Kid Rock debuts on Top Dog/Lava/Atlantic with Devil Without a Cause.

2000

Honored as a “Living Legend” by United States Library of Congress.

2003

Inducted into National Soccer Hall of Fame.

Ertegun and wife Mica donate gift to establish Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame at Jazz at Lincoln Center, in honor of Ahmet’s brother Nesuhi.

2004

Named founding chairman of Atlantic Records.

2005

Receives President’s Merit Award from National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences.

2006

Honored with opening night concert at 40th Montreux Jazz Festival.

December 14, 2006

Dies in New York City at age 83.

Since her introduction to filmmaking through the classic rock documentaries Woodstock and Gimme Shelter, Susan Steinberg has developed an intriguing body of work on subjects as diverse as Edward R. Murrow and Paul Simon. In interviews both before and after Ahmet Ertegun’s death in December, the director discusses AMERICAN MASTERS Atlantic Records: The House That Ahmet Built.

Q: What in your filmmaking background prepared you for this project?

A: AMERICAN MASTERS executive producer Susan Lacy hired me to do this because I have a background in music and in journalism. I’ve always been very interested in the field of communications and the powers that be. My first film for AMERICAN MASTERS was on Edward R. Murrow, the famed journalist who basically created broadcast journalism in the United States as we know it. Susan then asked me to direct 90 Minutes on 60 Minutes about the news broadcast magazine format show. My early days I spent working as an editor and an assistant on Gimme Shelter, on Woodstock and on a film that Robert Frank did called C***sucker Blues, a notorious underground film on the Rolling Stones. I also was the supervising editor on the AMERICAN MASTERS film on Ray Charles and made History of Rock n’ Roll in Ten Minutes for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, which Ahmet was very involved with. I had a background that he could respect. I had a combination of dealing with powerful people and music. I think I was a natural choice for Susan to direct this film on Ahmet and Atlantic Records.

Q: Tell us about your initial interaction with Ahmet Ertegun.

A: Susan Lacy set it up so that I would meet him when he went with his niece to a dinner at Princeton University where Ahmet, in honor of his father, had sponsored a chair for the Turkish Department. What struck me, in particular, was the way he conducted a dinner party that night. He rented a private dining room, set up the tables in an open square and carefully orchestrated the placement of the guests, who were virtual strangers. Before the night was over, this diverse group of people were laughing and talking as if they had known each other for years, listening to Ahmet tell hilarious stories. That’s when I first saw Ahmet, the son of a diplomat, at work.

Ahmet is a very eloquent, well-educated man, who is also very funny. He doesn’t speak in sound bites. Having seen him interviewed in other films, I had never seen the real Ahmet. The past interviews had showed what he knew, but not his personality, nor his character. While watching him at the dinner party something occurred to me: Ahmet is very sociable and his personality comes alive when he is in conversation. I discussed with Susan Lacy the idea of structuring the film around a series of conversations between Ahmet and the people he felt had been most important to him personally and professionally over the years, people whose lives had affected Atlantic Records and, in turn, whose lives Ahmet had affected. Ahmet gave Susan Lacy, the producer Phil Carson and I a list of these people and that’s whom we went to see.

Q: Who was on the list?

A: Everyone. Mick Jagger. Robert Plant. Bette Midler. His friend Henry Kissinger, his close friend Julio Mario Santo Domingo. Jimmy Page. Phil Collins. Ray Charles. Aretha Franklin. Eric Clapton. And many more. It took us over four years to get all these people with Ahmet, on film. Of course, none of us could have known that this would be the last time. These filmed conversations took on another quality that could not have been anticipated. Ahmet died on December 14, 2006, just six weeks after we had completed our final interview with him.

Q: Ertegun discovered a love of music at a very early age, correct?

A: Oh, yes. There’s a wonderful story of Ahmet growing up that’s told by his sister, Selma, who lives in Turkey. When Ahmet was about three years old, an aunt drew him a picture of an old-fashioned phonograph. Ahmet was delighted. He then said, “Put the record on.” So they drew the record. And then he said, “Play it.” Obviously, they couldn’t play it. Ahmet started to cry, saying “Play it, play it.” He wouldn’t give up until he wore himself out.

His passion and love of music began early. His mother played several instruments and she loved Turkish music. His older brother, Nesuhi, who was his mentor, fell in love with jazz as a young boy growing up in Paris. He would bring home jazz records and play them for his baby brother. Right from the start, Ahmet and Nesuhi had discovered their true love, jazz.

Q: Did he always know he was going to become a music producer – and did his father have a different idea?

A: He started out as a music lover and a record collector. He and his brother had collected 25,000 records, one of the largest jazz/blues collections in the world. At first it was a passion and a hobby. He said that everyone, including his father, expected that he would enter the diplomatic corps, saying “If my father had not died, I don’t think I would have been able to start Atlantic Records.” He had the brains and wherewithal to be a fantastic diplomat, which he exhibited throughout his entire career. Whether dealing with the Turkish government or with finicky artists or men in the record business, Ahmet utilized his tremendous diplomatic skills. Although he had strong opinions on almost everything, he could get along with anyone.

Q: What makes him an American Master?

A: Consider the fact that American pop culture, including music and movies, is probably one of the largest exports of this country. American music has influenced the world and Ahmet was one of the major players in making that happen. He fell in love with indigenous black American music and he brought it to the world. He wasn’t the only one, but he was pivotal. In Britain during the ’60s, there were all these talented young kids who had grown up listening to Atlantic Records, to Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, Big Joe Turner, Otis Redding, Wilson Picket. These kids were mesmerized by the same sounds that had seduced Ahmet – rhythm and blues, blues and jazz. Ahmet was attracted to these young musicians and they were attracted to him. It wasn’t surprising that Atlantic became the record company of choice for the up and coming British rockers of the ’60s: Cream, Blind Faith, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin.

Q: Speaking of that time period, you use clips from the controversial film on the Rolling Stones, C***sucker Blues, which was considered unreleasable because of its unabashed depiction of sex, drugs and rock and roll. How did you happen to include it in this film?

A: My first job as a film editor came about when Robert Frank, the famous photographer, hired me to edit this film that he had shot on the 1972 Rolling Stones tour of America, which coincided with the Stone’s release of the LP, Exile on Main Street. This was the second album the Stones made after they signed to Atlantic. There was footage of Ahmet backstage with Mick Jagger and friends. Since this was one of the few pieces of film that actually showed Ahmet hanging out with the bands backstage, something he often did, I wanted to include it. In fact, many say that Ahmet’s secret ingredient to success was his ability to hang out with the best of them. When we filmed the Mick Jagger and Ahmet together, I asked them about the film and they were so funny that I couldn’t resist including a bit of it in the program. The Stones gave us permission to do so.

Q: I wonder about the early Atlantic artists. All the successful musicians that Atlantic signed didn’t get rich like the Stones?

A: Oh no, of course not. One of the controversies that we dealt with in the film surrounded the royalty issue brought out in the open by early R&B artists like Ruth Brown against Atlantic. In the early days, the practice of paying royalties was almost nonexistent. Ahmet and Atlantic were generous on an ad hoc basis, like paying hospital bills for the young Ruth Brown, or paying for Joe Turner’s funeral. But when it came to royalties, they were surprisingly no better than the other record companies. It wasn’t a question of race. Leiber and Stoller speak of not getting royalties due to them from another record company after their song “Hound Dog,” first recorded by Big Mama Thornton, was a huge success. The whole world of R&B was run without great regard for artists’ rights. It was the way of the world in the late ’40s and ’50s.

With the advent of CDs and reissues and large foreign sales, things had to change. Ruth Brown led the fight and eventually won artists the rights and royalties they deserved. In the 1980s, as a result of her fight, everything changed. Royalty structures were reformulated and artists today certainly reap the benefits of their work, that is, if they are successful.

Q: What other controversies are addressed in the film?

A: Payola was and still is a practice that could not be avoided if you were to survive in the record business. The paying off of DJs was the rule of the game if you wanted your records played on the radio. And, of course, without play time, nobody would hear your records and thus they didn’t sell. I guess it was a method of advertising in the early days. And Atlantic did what other record companies did to survive.

What I hadn’t realized during the payola scandals was that it was not illegal to pay disc jockeys to play your record; rather it was illegal for the DJ not to give the money to the record station that they worked for. In other words, it was a bribe if the DJ pocketed the cash. We use the arrest of Alan Freed in the ’50s to talk about this practice. But just a month ago, I noticed that another “payola scandal” had made the front page.

Q: What did Ertegun think of rap music?

A: He loved rap. Ahmet never stopped growing. A lot of people – artists, promoters, entrepreneurs and business people – get stuck in the particular period that they began with. But Ahmet wasn’t like that. Ahmet just kept going. He was able to make transitions from jazz to rhythm and blues to soul to rock and roll to hard rock and to rap. He recorded all kinds of music, from opera to Turkish folk music.

He was always interested in what was happening today and tomorrow. When it came to rap, he understood that rap was the music of today. Rap artists were saying something that Ahmet understood and felt was important. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons he adored Kid Rock, who musically came of age working as a DJ in the black neighborhoods of Detroit.

Q: What is the Atlantic Sound?

A: The Atlantic sound seemed to grow out of the dream team that was created by this Tiffany of music companies, when it was Tom Dowd as the mixer, Jerry Wexler as a producer, Ahmet as a producer, Arif Mardin as a producer, Jesse Stone as an arranger. A very talented group of people. It was more sophisticated than Chess Records, which was for Chicago blues. It wasn’t exactly Motown. It was somewhere in between those two, but it was much more sophisticated.

Q: What’s the best way to describe Ahmet Ertegun?

A: Smart, funny, eclectic, a little perverse, sociable, passionate, and entrepreneurial. Although Ahmet came to America with a silver spoon in his mouth, he reminded me of the early Hollywood moguls who were also immigrants, but of a different sort. They all had confidence in their own instincts and their own judgments and they were willing always to bet on them. They didn’t need market research to tell them what was happening.

Q: What did you learn that surprised you the most?

A: How funny he was. And how much fun he was. I went to Turkey to film him in Bodrum, where he and Mica have a fantastic seaside home. I saw Ahmet on vacation, where he’d spend the day on his yacht with friends and then entertain 15 to 20 at his home every single, solitary night. He was the master of ceremony, par excellence. After dining, when most 82 year olds would head to bed, Ahmet would go out clubbing, listening to whatever music was happening, drinking, laughing and talking. At 82, he was always the last to bed. Even though I’m a lot younger than him, it was hard to keep up with him. And that part blew me away.

Q: What did the musicians you spoke to say about him?

A: They talked about the extraordinary energy. Energy, energy, energy. The common thread was that out of all the record executives that they had ever met, here was a guy who really knew music. They really respected how much he knew about music and how much he loved the music. And his instincts. When Bette Midler was first being recorded, she was having a hard time in the studio. He remembered seeing her live with an audience, so he decided to record her live and he threw a party and he had her sing the whole album right there and then. That’s not common.

When he first heard Eric Clapton and Cream, he brought them to New York and he recorded an album, Disraeli Gears, with them in just four days. It changed their lives. He heard in Eric the innate talent and that of a true blues artist. That’s the reason that all these artists participated in this program. Ahmet was responsible in a certain way for their careers. He was instrumental in encouraging Phil Collins to go solo. When Phil Collins put out his first solo album, he sent it to Ahmet and Ahmet said, “You know, there’s this one song where the drums aren’t loud enough. The kids aren’t going to hear it. Go back and remix it.” They did, and that became the single hit for the album. After many different reincarnations of the Drifters, they lost their lead singer and one day when they were recording they were trying various people. Finally, Ahmet said, “Who wrote the song?” And it happened to be Ben E. King, and he said “Well, let him sing it.”

Q: With so much great music to choose from, how did you ever decide what to include?

A: To some degree the music chose itself by the relation between Ahmet and the particular musician that we were dealing with. If there were lots of hits, Pam Arnold, a fabulous editor, and I chose the one that was the most appropriate to tell the story.

Q: You must have uncovered some incredible early recordings during research.

A: The most extraordinary thing that we found was an audio track of Ahmet singing the lyrics of “Mess Around,” a song he had written for Ray Charles. When I first listened to the recording, I couldn’t believe it was Ahmet. But it was Ahmet Ertegun singing the lyrics to Ray Charles. He sounded great. I would have never guessed it was Ahmet singing.

Q: The film has one of the last filmed interviewed with Ray Charles.

A: Yes, it was the last interview that Ray Charles and Ahmet Ertegun ever did together. Ray died very shortly afterward. There aren’t many interviews of them together, if any. As a matter of fact, we only found two photographs of Ahmet and Ray together. We found interviews in a film about Eric Clapton. Ahmet was interviewed and Eric was interviewed, but not together.

Q: How did you structure the film with regard to the conversations between Ahmet and the musicians?

A: I had written a full-length treatment for the film. We set up the interviews with two high definition cameras, so that we would be able to inter-cut the conversation. I had written myself a list of topics that I wanted to be sure to cover, and from time to time I’d throw out something that I’d like them to talk about. That’s how it worked. It was very free and relaxed. Ahmet just visited with his friends and reminisced. But it was also structured around what I needed to tell the story. There were lots of left turns, and lots of times the guest would turn the tables and ask Ahmet questions as if they were interviewing him.

Q: How much did the cooperation of Atlantic Records and Ahmet Ertegun mean to this project?

A: You couldn’t do a film without Ahmet’s cooperation, which Susan Lacy and Phil Carson secured before we started filming. Remember, he was alive and well during filming. You could not possibly do this without Atlantic Records total, unadulterated, 100 percent cooperation. Ahmet was and is Atlantic records. Partners came and went, but Ahmet was the steady hand and the soul of the company.

Q: Describe your last interview with Ertegun.

A: Fortuitously, I did my very last interview with Ahmet about a month before he fell backstage at the Rolling Stones concert. I was not planning on doing my final interview until almost the end of the film. But we had been trying to get Ahmet to work with a new artist named James Blunt and he happened to be coming to town for a very large tour beginning at Radio City Music Hall and wanted to get together with Ahmet. I flew in from London just for that interview. Since I had a camera crew I thought I would flesh out my final interview with Ahmet. I had only 10 questions left to ask. Ahmet spoke to me for three hours. Bob Kaus, his public relations man who’s been with the company and with Ahmet for over 30 years, I believe, said it was by far the best interview that he had done in many years. His memory was extraordinary. I’m hoping the full interview will be available on the Web site or in a magazine because it really was terribly interesting, riveting.

Q: What were some of the 10 questions?

A: He always said that the two most important artists in the 20th century were Louis Armstrong and Pablo Picasso because they influenced everyone and everything in the 20th century. I wanted him to play a Louis Armstrong song that he particularly liked, to play Turkish Gypsy music, Duke Ellington and to talk to me about his ideas on music. I also wanted to talk to him about growing up in the embassy in Paris. I wanted to know more about the man, not necessarily just about the music business. Ahmet’s life is an enormous canvas and there is so much that didn’t make it into the two-hour program.

Q: What about his personal life?

A: He had no children. And he was married to the same woman, Mica Ertegun, for 48 years. She is as interesting as Ahmet. Ahmet was no pushover and nor is Mica. She is lovely. She has given us so much for the film, all the stills, family stills, and helped us also get home movies from Ahmet’s sister Selma that no one has ever seen before. They are fantastic. There’s footage of Ahmet and cousins in the Turkish embassy in Paris in the 1920s and also footage of Ahmet as a teenager, his mother, his brother and others dancing on the terrace of the Turkish embassy in Washington in the late 1930s.

Q: Please tell us about Phil Carson.

A: Phil Carson, the producer of the film, had a very close personal and professional relationship with Mr. Ertegun that began when Carson ran the London Atlantic records office in the mid ’60s. It lasted all this time. Carson’s involvement was an essential aspect of the film from the beginning to the end. I don’t think the film could have been made without Phil Carson.

Q: What are some of the themes of the film?

A: How the immigrant, the outsider, comes and sees America with fresh eyes. The theme of the diplomat, how his diplomatic upbringing impacted how he chose music and how he ran Atlantic Records. Ahmet the prankster, the party-loving guy. Part of his charm was that he could party. He had tradition and modernity, and the combination of both. One of the strongest themes is the duality of Ahmet. Ahmet had the capacity to be as comfortable with kings and queens as with the guy in the shop, in a juke joint and in a barbecue pit. He traversed both worlds easily, and all in between.

Q: What would you say is the most compelling aspect of the story?

A: You can’t really separate the man and the music. I always try to some degree to look at how a man impacts his world. To put him into a context. The film that I made for American Masters on the famed journalist, Edward R. Murrow, is as much about the history of broadcast journalism as it was about the man who created it. When I did an American Masters film about Don Hewitt, the man who created 60 Minutes, I was also able to explore the history of the magazine format show and how it changed television news throughout the world. I’ve tried to put Ahmet’s story into the context of the record industry. The record business has changed radically. Independent record companies like Atlantic Records are no longer what they were. To some degree, I hope that this film also serves as a historical document of what the record business is and was, for generations to come.

Q: Tell us about shooting at the Montreux Jazz Festival, which honored Ertegun last year.

A: Ahmet Ertegun supported every major musical project that took place in the 20th century. He supported Woodstock, he was one of the founders of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum. He was one of the people responsible for Jazz at Lincoln Center. He was at the center of promoting elements of popular music for 60 years. He and his brother were two of the first people to support Claude Nobbs in setting up the Montreux Jazz Festival, held every summer in Montreux, Switzerland. This year there was a tribute to Ahmet and Atlantic Records for their 60th anniversary.

I am so pleased that Ahmet was alive to see it, to enjoy it, and to receive the honors that he deserved. It was a fantastic evening and is part of our film. Many of our artists were there, namely Kid Rock, Robert Plant, Ben E. King, Solomon Burke, Stevie Nicks, Steve Winwood, Les McCann, Chaka Khan, and a young talent who is already well known in England – Paolo Nutini, 19 years old, half Scottish, half Italian. I was so pleased that Ahmet got to really enjoy that night. It was really something. And he was very touched.

Q: When is the 60th anniversary of Atlantic Records?

A: This year – 2007. Ahmet opened the door of Atlantic Records in 1947, so it’s very much the 60th anniversary.