IN MEMORIAM: LES PAUL 1915 – 2009

THE WIZARD OF WAUKESHA
By Dave Tianen
reprinted with permission from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

New York – For decades, arthritis has slowly devoured the talent in Les Paul’s hands.

The right essentially has become a stiff claw. The ring and pinkie are all that is usable on the left, and arthritis is eating away at them.

The right arm is mangled too, permanently bent at a 90 degree angle from a car wreck in 1948. There are seven screws in the arm, and the tendon in the elbow is shot.

Yet he continues to play.

Every Monday night, the great guitarist carries his 92-year-old body and his 44-year-old Gibson onstage at the Iridium Jazz Club at 51st and Broadway. Still introduced as “The Wizard of Waukesha,” he does two shows – one at 8, one at 10 – in the basement nightclub.

Both are packed. Always.

Many, perhaps most, in the crowd weren’t even born in the early ’50s when Paul and his wife Mary Ford were major stars on TV and radio, topping the charts with a succession of hits: “Tennessee Waltz,” “Mockin’ Bird Hill,” “How High the Moon,” “Tiger Rag” and “Vaya Con Dios.”

That music helped define an era, but Paul ignores most of it now, opting instead for the standards he played during his jazz days in the ’30s and ’40s. It matters little.

Paul is that rare case where legend trumps celebrity. His last top 10 hit was in 1955, and he’s rarely seen on TV. But his great legacy has been blending the talent of a gifted musician with the skills of an inventor and engineer.

Influenced by the great gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, Paul was one of the best and earliest electric guitarists. Along with a handful of players like George Barnes, Merle Travis and Charlie Christian, he changed the sound of popular music. And if Paul didn’t actually invent the solid body electric guitar (a fiction which he happily tolerates), he was a pioneer in its evolution, and he did more than anyone to popularize what would become the dominant instrumental voice of contemporary music.

His influence can be heard on almost every song on the radio, and musicians honor him with near reverence. Certainly no other Wisconsin musician approaches his impact on not just music, but popular culture.

Obsession with sound

A notorious fussbudget about sound, Paul arrives at the Iridium from his home in Mahwah, N.J., at 4:15 p.m., nearly four hours before his first show, so he has time to fine-tune the sound system. He is joined by his son and sound man Rusty, who lives with him, and another sound man. Since moving to its new locale at 1650 Broadway, the club has gone to great lengths to meet Paul’s demands.

“He made us change the whole sound system” club owner Irving Sturm cheerfully grumps. “We upgraded to like a $45,000 sound system, a Meyer sound system, because he is such a perfectionist. We did it, luckily for us, and the music has been very, very good. He’s a pain in the butt, a terrible perfectionist, he’s always bitching about something, but he’s always right.”

Of course, sound and its replication are a central part of the Les Paul saga. He is acknowledged as a father of multitrack recording, overdubbing and the electronic reverb effect. Multitrack recording had intrigued Paul since he experimented as a kid with poking extra holes in the sheets for his mom’s player piano.

In 1946, a gentleman named Colonel Dick Ranger approached Paul with a captured German tape recorder. Paul knew that Bing Crosby (whom Paul backed on a No. 1 hit in 1945) had been looking for recording techniques that would allow him to record at home. With financing from Crosby, and with the German prototype in hand, the Ampex Co. started making tape recorders.

Working in his own garage studio, Paul started to layer his own recordings. In 1947, he released a recording of the Rodgers and Hart standard “Lover” with eight guitars layered over each other. When “Lover” became a hit, he repeated the process and made a second hit, “Brazil.” Eventually, overdubbing became standard on his recordings.

It’s arguable that Paul’s impact on recording is as great as his impact on the evolution of guitars.

“I got a letter from Sinatra,” he says. “It’s a wonderful letter. I don’t remember the exact words, but he says if it wasn’t for you, I’d still be recording my first song. It was the multitrack recording he meant. Paul McCartney said the same thing: ‘I don’t care how much guitar you played, I don’t care how many hits you had, you invented that multitrack recording, and that made the difference.’ ”

Humble beginnings

Although he was a professional musician even as a child, Paul didn’t start out as a guitarist. Lester William Polfuss was born June 9, 1915, on North St. in Waukesha. The Polfuss family lived in an apartment adjoining the automobile garage Les’ dad operated. At age 8, Les was given an old harmonica by a construction worker, and within a year he was good enough to play in school talent contests.

When he was 9, his mother arranged for him to take piano lessons from a local woman who taught in her home. According to Mary Alice Shaughnessy, his biographer, after several lessons Les was sent home with a note that said: “Dear Mrs. Polfuss, your boy Lester will never learn music, so save your money. Please don’t send him for any more lessons.”

By the time he was 12, Les was making as much as $30 a week just playing for tips on the streets of Waukesha. About this time, Shaughnessy writes, Les acquired his first guitar, a $5 purchase earned by picking potato bugs off a local patch.

He also acquired a fascination with a regular on Chicago’s WLS Saturday Night Barn Dance called Pie Plant Pete. These were the early days of radio when live in-studio performers carried the programming load. Les idolized Pie Plant Pete, copied his sailor dress and even went to see him when the WLS troupe visited a Waukesha theater. Pete showed his fan some simple guitar chords and lighted a flame that continues to burn over seven decades later.

By the time he was 13, Shaughnessy relates, Les was a regular at local service clubs, talent shows and the Thursday night concerts at Waukesha’s Cutler Park band shell. At 17, going by the name Red Hot Red in reference to his hair color, he got an invitation to join Rube Tronson’s Cowboys, a regional country band. Within the year, Les had quit high school and become a full-time pro.

Through the 1930s, he followed one radio gig after another, moving to St. Louis and then to Chicago, migrating from his hillbilly roots to jazz and pop, and changing his stage name, first to Rhubarb Red and then to Les Paul. His big national break came in 1939 when, at age 24, he landed a job in New York with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, a big name band with a national radio show.

Developing ‘The Log’

Along the way, he kept tinkering with his instrument.

Hollow body electric guitars were being developed and commercially manufactured as early as the 1920s, but they were prone to distortion when amplified. When he was still in his Waukesha band shell days, Paul often found his acoustic guitar drowned out in a band.

He started experimenting with different ways to amplify the guitar. One experiment was to fill his hollow body guitar with plaster of Paris; it cut distortion but left him with a very, very heavy instrument. He apparently also tried mounting strings on an old railroad tie.

“He was an early innovator,” says Alan di Perna, West Coast editor for Guitar World. “There were other people who were technical innovators, but they didn’t play like Les did.”

By 1941, still only 26, Paul had fashioned a workable solid body guitar he dubbed The Log, since it was essentially a four-by-four block of solid pine with a tailpiece, two pickups and a Gibson neck mounted on it. Later, for appearances, he fixed two side wings from an Epiphone guitar so it would actually resemble a guitar.When he approached Gibson Guitars about the commercial potential of The Log, Shaughnessy reports, they told him it was “nothing but a broomstick with a pickup on it.”

By the early ’50s, Gibson started to revise its view of solid body electric guitars. A California engineer named Leo Fender had introduced a commercial solid body electric guitar, and Gibson didn’t want to get left behind. Their design department quickly put together its own version, and went to Paul seeking his endorsement.

So it was that in 1952, the Les Paul Guitar arrived, although Paul himself had contributed only minor elements to its design. The endorsement deal made him wealthy, and the brand name made him a legend.

Shaughnessy says: “Gibson made extraordinary guitars. That is why Les’ name lives on. It is not because of the four years of hit making. The reason he’s going to live long past his musical contributions is because of this extraordinary guitar that bears his name.”

As for The Log, it’s now in the collection of the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Retirement and rebirth

During World War II, Paul was drafted into the Army, where he became a regular player for the Armed Forces Radio Service, or AFRS. Paul served his country living at home in Hollywood and playing on the radio with the biggest names of the day. After leaving the Army, he hooked up with the biggest recording act in the world – Bing Crosby – and in 1945, he and his trio scored their first No. 1 hit, backing Crosby on “It’s Been a Long Long Time.” Other hits followed. In the late ’40s, Paul linked up with a sweet-voiced backup singer for Gene Autry named Colleen Summers. Paul renamed her Mary Ford, and she became his professional partner. In 1949, he split with his first wife, Virginia Webb Paul, (the couple had two sons, Rusty and Gene) and married Ford on Dec. 29 of that year in the Milwaukee County Courthouse. At the time, the couple was in town for an extended engagement at a club called Fazio’s.

The couple eventually adopted a daughter, Colleen, and had a son of their own, Robert.

By the early ’50s, Les Paul and Mary Ford were one of the biggest acts in the music business, with a TV show, a radio show and a string of hit records. In the mid-1950s, though, the country’s taste in music changed almost overnight. Paul and Ford had one last top 10 hit, “Hummingbird,” in 1955.

Then rock ‘n’ rollers crushed his career with the very instrument he’d given them.

As his and Ford’s professional lives nose-dived, their marriage frayed as well. They were divorced in 1964.

On top of everything else, health was becoming an issue.

“The main reason I retired was because I injured this arm, this finger. I had surgery on it in ‘61. That was the beginning of my hand problems,” Paul says. Other health issues piled on top of the arthritis. In 1969, a friend playfully cuffed him on the head and broke his right eardrum. Three operations followed, but there was permanent hearing loss.

There was one bright spot: In the late ’70s, he made a Grammy-winning comeback with fellow guitar legend Chet Atkins on the album “Chester and Lester.” Then came more health problems. There was a heart attack followed by bypass surgery.

“Then came a funny thing. The doctor called me in his office,” Paul recalls. “He said, ‘I want you to promise me two things. One, I want you to be my friend, and two, I want you to work.’

“I said, ‘I thought that’s what got me in here.’

“He said, ‘Hard work never hurt nobody. I want you to promise me you’ll go back to the clubs.’

“So they wheeled me into the room and I asked the nurse for a piece of paper. I drew a line down the middle. I wrote down all the things I didn’t like, the things I couldn’t do. And I wrote the things I would like to do if I went back to work.”

Paul knew exactly what he wanted to do.

“For my whole career, all the things I’d done, nothing impressed me as much as just playing in a little club. There’s no pressure. You can do what you want to do.”

In his late 60s, already set for life financially, Paul started looking for work.

“I looked all over. I came to New York and I looked for a place. I finally walked up to the maitre d’ of the place and said, ‘My name’s Les Paul.’

“He said, ‘How many will be seated?’

“I said, ‘I don’t want to be seated. I want to talk to you about a job.’

“He looked at this old guy and thought, ‘He wants a job here?’

“So he said, ‘What kind of work do you do?’ – figuring I was going to wash dishes or something like that.

“I said, ‘I’m a musician. Obviously you’ve never heard of me.’

“I asked if he had an owner. I walked over to the owner and introduced myself to the owner and he said, ‘Not the Les Paul?’

“I knew that was good.

“He said, ‘What are you doing in this joint?’

“I said, ‘I’m looking for a job. I want to go to work. I want to come in here and play with a trio one night a week.’ I said, ‘I hear you’re closed on Monday.’

“‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘We’re closed. I don’t know how we can work that out.’

“I said, ‘Well, I’ll work for nothing.’

“He said, ‘We’re open Mondays!’ ”

Back to the stage

From 1984 to 1995, Paul, backed by Lou Pallo on guitar and Wayne Wright on bass, was a Monday night fixture at Fat Tuesdays. But the hands continued to get worse. To cope with the pain, Paul took medication, which eventually gave him an ulcer. There was no choice but to quit playing.

While Paul was mending, he got a call from Ron Sturm, the owner of a new jazz club in New York City.

“He said, ‘When you’re ready, I want you here. No matter what the deal is, we’ll top it. We want you.’ So I knew I had a home when I got well enough,” Paul recalls.

Still, when he came to the Iridium in 1996, he had doubts.

“I thought, ‘What am I going to do? I can’t play like I used to. I can’t do what I used to do. The hands are all messed up. What am I going to do?’ … I’d been away from it for a year. I went up there and the audience seemed to not mind at all.

“It was at that time that a woman came over to the bar. She said she didn’t want to drink, she just wanted to talk to Les Paul. She was a nurse. She said, ‘I came over here to tell you something.’ She said, ‘Many of the people who are coming in to see you are coming because of what you used to do, but they’re not expecting you to do what you used to do. They’re expecting to see and hear what you can do now… .’ She made me understand that if Joe Louis got into the ring at 75, he’s not going to be what he was when he was 20. And nobody expects him to be that. So with that in mind, I went up on the stage with an understanding of myself, what I could do and what I couldn’t do and I could live with it. And it worked.”

Deep, wide imprint

Paul’s influence continues to ripple through rock, jazz and country. All Music Guide describes his style as “astonishingly fluid, hard-swinging” with “extremely rapid runs, fluttered and repeated single notes and clunking rhythm support.” It was a style that carried him easily across musical boundaries. The late Atkins, surely the most influential of all country pickers (and an important architect of the Nashville sound), always cited Les Paul as a major touchstone.

“The story’s been repeated of Les coming to Springfield, Missouri, and seeing Chet play at KWTO and Chet, not knowing that Les was watching, was trying to impress this guy who was paying special attention to what Chet was doing,” recalls Jay Orr, senior museum editor of the Country Music Hall of Fame. “Then later he found out that it was Les Paul. Chet felt a little bashful because he had been showing off with some of Les Paul’s patented licks.”

Although he’s never played rock ‘n’ roll himself, Paul’s imprint has been felt on rock since the beginning.

Many second generation ’60s rockers grew up listening to the Ventures and their guitar hits, such as “Walk, Don’t Run” “Perfidia” and “Hawaii 5-O.” Bob Bogel of the Ventures says Paul was a huge inspiration to his band.

“We were influenced by him, but we didn’t try to play his style,” Bogel says. “He was way too accomplished for us… . I’ve always admired his work and I’ve always been a huge fan of his. In interviews they’d ask us our influences and we’d always say The Big Three: Les Paul and Chet Atkins and Duane Eddy.” Today major rock guitarists such as Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Slash have acknowledged their debt. Jazz musicians pay him homage as well. Some of the highest profile players in the world, such as George Benson and Al Di Meola, are huge fans. Di Meola played at Paul’s 88th birthday party at the Iridium.

At his Monday night shows, brother celebrities come to pay homage almost as a matter of course. Tony Bennett. Harry Belafonte. Brian Setzer. George Benson. Paul McCartney. Jeff Beck. Paul Shaffer. Keith Richards.

Reflecting on the common heritage shared by such disparate artists and styles of music, blues rocker Jon Paris says, “All roads lead to Les.”

In his element

In the late afternoon, the basement jazz club is deserted except for staffers setting out gray tablecloths and place settings. Vintage jazz posters dot the walls: Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club … Benny Goodman at some hotel in Pittsburgh. Diana Krall’s version of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” is heard through the monitors. Although reputed to be “richer than God,” the old guitarist carries his Gibson solid body in a battered case with frayed edges and duct tape wrapped around the handle.

A notoriously indifferent dresser, Paul is resplendent by his standards: black slacks and a short black jacket over a burgundy turtleneck. Perched on a stool, fussing over his guitar, he has an almost professorial countenance. The pudgy frame he had in his prime has thinned and withered. The carrot hair has whitened and thinned. He wears glasses, and there are hearing aids in both ears. Still, for a man edging toward 90, he moves fairly well. But when he walks only the left arm swings. That crooked right arm just hangs.

Gradually the rest of the band drifts in. Rhythm guitarist Lou Pallo has played with Paul off and on for 40 years. Acoustic bassist Nicki Parrott, 32, is a much newer addition. She came to the states from Australia on an arts council scholarship and stayed, and has been playing with Paul for 21/2 years. Joining them tonight will be guitarist Howard Alden, a boyish 40-year-old with an imposing list of jazz credits. The sound check/rehearsal material anticipates the sets: “All of Me,” “Begin the Beguine,” “Caravan,” “Tennessee Waltz” done as a guitar boogie.

“He rehearses the same material week after week,” says Iridium co-owner Ellen Hart. “He’s very precise. Everything has to be exact.” Eventually, Paul gets the sound where he wants it and the band heads backstage for a chicken dinner. Here, Paul is perhaps even more in his element, greeting visitors and holding court.

A thirtyish documentary filmmaker is sitting next to Paul on a couch, and she scratches his back while they chat. She stops for a moment, and he pipes up with, “OK. My crotch itches now.”

Without a pause she fires back, “I can take care of that!”

Nurturing Waukesha tie

Paul claims he’s busier than ever, no small boast from a man renowned as a hard pusher who continues to live on what Nashville calls Central Elvis Time. He rarely rises before noon or 1 p.m. and stays up typically until 4 a.m. This day, he will do two one-hour sets at the Iridium, sign autographs until midnight, do two radio interviews and eventually turn in back in Mahwah around 8 a.m.

“His pace is go-go-go. Even now,” says his friend and biographer Robb Lawrence, who lived with the guitarist for several months in the mid-’70s. Paul is working on two books and coordinating Les Paul exhibits at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and the Waukesha County Historical Society & Museum.

Although the Historical Society is still fund-raising and hasn’t set an opening date, Executive Director Sue Baker says: “It will be the showcase exhibit in the museum. It will be 5,000 square feet. It will be large and hands-on. When you walk in, you will walk into Les’ world in Waukesha.”

Paul clearly loves to reminisce and spin tales about the old days. Lawrence says, “Les has a great sense of humor, and he is known to create tall stories for the love of it.”

Shaughnessy agrees. “He overwhelms you with stories,” says the author of “Les Paul: An American Original,” published in 1993. “He’s a champion storyteller. Half of it is bull, but it’s fun to listen to.”

Bing Crosby is clearly a favorite topic. Working with Crosby on radio, Paul backed such legends as Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, W.C. Fields, the Andrews Sisters and Frank Sinatra. He claims to remember being there the first time Crosby and Sinatra met. He recalls Crosby was wary before the show.

“Bing was in the men’s room. So I go in the men’s room and I’m right next to him and Bing says to me, ‘Can the kid sing?’ That was his question.

“I said, ‘I’m afraid so.’

“So I walked out and he was still in there washin’ and puttin’ his wig on. So I walked out and Hedda Hopper (the gossip columnist) was there. I was leaning against the door. She said, ‘Have you seen Bing?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he’s in there.’ She said thanks and she went in.

“So Bing comes out and he says, ‘Where’s that goddamn redhead?’ ”

A special night

Business interrupts the backstage chat. It’s showtime. The Iridium introduces him as “The man who changed the music for all of us – The Wizard of Waukesha – Les Paul.”

The stories continue on-stage. Some of them are awful jokes at the expense of Pallo. And there’s lots of benign flirting with Nicki Parrott. He tells the crowd she makes him feel like an old building with a new flagpole.

She rejoins with a randy blues song: “I’m an evil gal, Les; I like older men; think they’re the best; One night with Les and you’ll forget all the rest. Les, get that Viagra.”

Woven into the comedy are the songs: “Sunny Side of the Street.” “Blue Skies.” “Over the Rainbow.” “Someone To Watch Over Me.” “It Had To Be You.” “The Sheik of Araby.” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” “Sweet Georgia Brown.” One of the old hits with Ford – “How High the Moon.” Paul even sings “Bill Bailey.” Everybody gets to solo, and there’s clearly an effort to rest that ailing left hand.

During the second set, the guests start to come up. There’s a dancer friend of Parrott’s named Roxane Butterfly. She tap dances to “Tea For Two” and the crowd loves it. Old friend and fellow Wisconsinite Jon Paris comes up. With him tonight is former Muddy Waters band member Steady Rollin’ Bob Margolin. Margolin romps through an impromptu “Don’t Let Me Kill This Woman Please.”

Everything works. The crowd loves Margolin. They love Paris. Most of all, they love Paul. For an encore, he does “Paper Moon.”

“This is a wonderful night for us,” he tells the crowd.

After the show, he sits at a table in back of the club and signs autographs and poses for pictures for two hours. A line of perhaps 60 people stretches through the club. Everybody gets an autograph, a picture or both. Some get two or three autographs.

The left hand is still iced, but Paul sits patiently, sipping a Haake Beck non-alcoholic beer, chatting and posing for pictures. He signs books, CDs, pictures, programs, guitars, ball caps and body parts. A professor from Texas, in New York with a group of students, insists he sign her breast with a felt pen, and he cheerfully obliges.

“I sign lots of boobs,” he says.

The fans, who appear to range in age from early 20s to early 60s, approach Paul with a mixture of good cheer and awe.

“Mr. Paul, I can’t say what a privilege this is. My whole life I’ve been waiting to meet you… . ”

“Can I have a hug?”

“Hi Mr. Paul. It’s a honor to meet you… . Thank you for all you’ve done. It certainly made my life more enjoyable.”

Everyone gets a moment, and Paul seems to love it almost as much as they do. And yet there’s a part of it that still mystifies him.

He mentions it while leaving the club.

“Bing asked me, ‘Why do people like me?’ He didn’t know. I don’t think he or Sinatra understood that. I’m the same way. I have no idea why people like what it is that I do.”

“The Wizard of Waukesha” took up his first instrument, a harmonica, at age eight. By 13, he was performing. His incredible trajectory is thoroughly explored in AMERICAN MASTERS Les Paul: Chasing Sound. Here are some highlights from his life and career.

1915
Lester William Polfuss is born June 9 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to parents George and Evelyn Polfuss.

1923-6
Punches new holes into his mother’s player piano rolls, achieving a crude multi-track effect; learns harmonica from an itinerant ditch-digger; builds a crystal radio set and begins weekend studies of sound electronics with WTMJ radio engineer.

1927-8
Receives first guitar – a Sears, Roebuck Troubadour; performs in Waukesha as “Red Hot Red;” meets idols Gene Autry and Pie Plant Pete touring with Chicago’s WLS Barn Dance shows; experiments with amplification and electrified guitar at Beekman’s Bar-B-Q; builds first disc-cutting lathe with Cadillac flywheel and dental belts; attempts first “solid-body” guitar, using a railroad track strung with wire and a telephone amplifier as the pickup.

1929
Joins Rube Tronson and his Texas Cowboys for a summer gig in Escanaba, Michigan, and befriends his mentor and guitar tutor, “Sunny Joe” Wolverton.

1932
Drops out of high school and teams up with Wolverton as “Sunny Joe” and “Rhubarb Red,” performing for “hillbilly” radio stations in Springfield and St. Louis, Missouri.

1933
Rhubarb Red and Sunny Joe move on to Chicago to perform at the World’s Fair and then with WBBM, until Paul decides to pursue jazz – living a dual identity as Rhubarb Red on daytime radio and as Les Paul at night, jamming with the jazz greats.

1934-6
Forms the Les Paul Trio with Ernie Newton and Jimmie Atkins; makes Decca blues recordings with Georgia White; and begins the first of many solid-body guitar experiments, paying the Larson Brothers $15 to build a single cutaway half-inch maple top, with no f-holes and two pickups.

1937
Joins Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians on NBC radio, bringing the sound of the electric guitar to millions of listeners coast to coast.

1939
Performs in a White House concert for President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

1941
Working weekends at the Epiphone factory in New York City, builds “The Log” by attaching a standard Epiphone neck, strings and wings to a 4×4 board with a pickup. When M. H. Berlin, president of Gibson Guitar’s parent company, takes little interest in this “solid-body,” Paul braces an Epiphone hollow body with a 3/8-inch steel bar, winds his own super-hot pickups and, for a decade or more, uses “The Klunker” as his primary electrified guitar for performing and recording.

1942
Moves to Los Angeles with the dream of teaming up with Bing Crosby and replacing the late Eddie Lang, Paul’s guitar idol.

1944
Drafted into Armed Forces Radio Service, where he creates V-Disc recordings and AFRS radio shows. Tangles with Nat Cole during the first “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concert in Los Angeles, one of history’s most famous jams.

1945
Provides brilliant accompaniment for Bing Crosby’s post-war record hit “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.” Impressed with Paul’s technical wizardry, Crosby urges him to build a studio. Paul soundproofs his garage in Hollywood, where he records the Andrews Sisters, Art Tatum, Jo Stafford, Andy Williams, Kay Starr, Pee Wee Hunt, Andre Previn, Tex Williams, and W.C. Fields.

1945
Gene Autry introduces Colleen Summers (Mary Ford) to Paul, who returns to his “Rhubarb Red” persona to perform “hillbilly” radio shows with Ford on NBC.

1946
Paul’s mother complains that every guitar player on the radio sounds just like him. Paul leaves tour with the Andrews Sisters and returns to his garage studio in Hollywood for two years of research into echo, overdubbing, phasing, and other recording effects.

1948
Emerges from studio with 22 “New Sound” recordings of multiple overdubbed guitars; Capitol Records releases Paul’s first solo hit single – “Lover” backed by “Brazil.” Paul and Ford inaugurate their musical act in Waukesha; en route back to California, their convertible careens off Route 66 during a winter storm. Paul’s right arm is badly damaged and doctors recommend amputation, but Paul persuades them to re-set arm in a crook so that he can continue to play.

1949
Bing Crosby commissions Ampex Corporation to produce the first tape recorder, based on the wartime German prototype. Bing gives first Ampex model to Paul, who promptly orders an additional recording head and invents the “sound-on-sound” tape machine. Paul marries Mary Ford and hosts a radio show, “The Les Paul Show,” which airs for 23 weeks.

1950
Gibson Guitar Corp. begins work on a solid-body electric guitar and seeks endorsement of the most prominent guitarist of the day.

1951
“How High the Moon” and “Walkin’ & Whistlin’ Blues” are chart-busters; Paul and Ford play the London Palladium.

1951-6:
Paul and Ford create a string of 14 consecutive pop hits, including “Mocking Bird Hill,” “Tennessee Waltz,” “Bye, Bye, Blues,” “Tiger Rag,” “Waiting for the Sunrise,” and “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.”

1952
Moves to Mahwah, New Jersey, to produce “Les Paul & Mary Ford At Home,” a series of 5-minute television shows (170 episodes) sponsored by Listerine. Release of the Gibson “Gold Top,” the first commercial “Les Paul model” solid-body electric guitar.

1953
Conceives of 8-track tape recorder and works with Ampex to refine and manufacture the equipment. Release of Paul and Ford’s biggest hit, “Vaya Con Dios.”

1955
As guest speaker at Audio Engineers Society convention, Paul proposes the “use of light for recording sound.”

1956
Invents the “Les Paulverizer,” a remote-control device he attaches below the tailpiece of his guitar to manipulate the taped accompaniment he and Ford used during their White House concert for President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

1957
Ampex delivers first operational 8-track recorder to Paul. Capitol Records contract ends as rock and roll pushes Paul and Ford off the charts. They sign with Mitch Miller at Columbia Records.

1963
Paul and Ford separate.

1964
Retires from performing, but not from tinkering with pickup designs and other electronics.

1964
Divorced from Mary Ford.

1975
Carnegie Hall concert with Bucky Pizzarelli, George Benson and Laurindo Almeida.

1976
Emerges from retirement to record “Chester & Lester” with Chet Atkins, and a 1978 follow-up, “Guitar Monsters.” The former receives a 1977 Grammy for “Best Country Instrumental Performance.”

1977
Mary Ford dies in Los Angeles after lapsing into diabetic coma.

1979
Receives Recording Academy’s Grammy Hall of Fame Award for “How High the Moon.”

1980
Quintuple by-pass heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic.

1983
Receives prestigious Trustees Award from the Recording Academy.

1984
Launches a regular Monday night gig with his trio in New York City, first at Fat Tuesdays and then at the Iridium Jazz Club.

1985
Induction into Hollywood Guitar Center’s “Rock Walk of Fame.”

1988
Lauded in a Cinemax tribute, Les Paul: He Changed the Music, with B.B. King, Eddie Van Halen and others.

1988
Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as “Architect of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

1996
Induction into New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame; presented The John Smithson Bicentennial Medal by the Smithsonian Institution.

1997
Featured in a celebrated Coors “Original” beer commercial: Young rocker: “What’s your name?” Les Paul: “It’s on your guitar.”

2001
Awarded a Technical Grammy by the Recording Academy.

2005
Celebrates his 90th birthday with a tribute concert at Carnegie Hall; inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame; receives Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

2006
Two 2005 Grammy awards – Best Pop Instrumental Performance (”Caravan”) and Best Rock Instrumental Performance (”69 Freedom Special”) – for Les Paul & Friends (Capitol), his first new album in almost 30 years. Among Paul’s musical partners: Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Buddy Guy.

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.