Chapter 27
These records don't spring fullblown from Minerva's ear ... Ahmet, Jac, Jerry, Joe, Mo, Nesuhi, and the baby mogul ... Ertegun in pursuit of the Jagger ... Icing on the cake in London
MO OSTIN: With Warner Bros., Elektra, and Atlantic—WEA—we were a powerful combination. We started our own domestic and international distribution, shifting from music licensing arrangements abroad to our own companies in England, France, Germany and Japan, and that was the beginning of Warner Communications becoming a very important big business. And for years and years the Number 1 profit center and cash generator was the record group. That was a very important turning point for us. And part of what enabled us to get into this vertical integration was that we were able to acquire Elektra. That was the swing factor.
MEL POSNER: For Jac, I think that the association with the Ahmet Erteguns and the Jerry Wexlers and the Mo Ostins was an important advance in his own mind. It was one thing to be a wealthy man; it's another to be accepted into that community. Jac wanted to be one of those guys. And now he was.
JAC: In 1969-1970 we had expanded our operations in New York with our new offices in the Gulf & Western Building. In 1970-1971 we enlarged our LA operation on La Cienega, with more office space and a second and bigger studio, which we called Studio A. But for me, more than impressive facilities and financial success, it was the smart people I was working with that was the measure of where I had come to.
BRUCE BOTNICK: Jac said, "This is going to be great."
JOE SMITH: Jac loves to be part of a fellowship. Elektra was a company run and controlled by Jac, and there weren't many people that he could feel were peers, that he could bounce things off of. Jac loved the relationship that Mo Ostin and I had—two people who could discuss things on the highest level, both policy makers. So he came into this group and I remember him hugging everybody, and we felt just like, "We're brothers, come in and join the fold."
JAC: I felt that I finally had found a home in the company of people I admired and of whom I was enormously fond. This crazy array of wild characters—
STAN CORNYN:—Jerry Wexler, a delightful man, as outspoken people are, if you're not afraid of them. Very hip, tends to use patterns of obscure words. Loves to phrase.
MO OSTIN: He coined the term "rhythm and blues."
STAN CORNYN: And he was the traditionalist. For a long time he kept alive the Atlantic black tradition. One remembers with some delight that if anyone ever brought him an Atlantic single that had something like a string section on it, he would vituperate to the extreme, usually having to do with various synonyms for excrement.
Ahmet Ertegun—self-acknowledged as not being the office man. He considered his strength to be on a plane, in a hotel, in a café, or bar, or club, hanging out, connecting, relationships.
MO OSTIN: Ahmet can relate to artists as well as anybody I'm aware of.
STAN CORNYN: Mo I think of as being tremendous at the record business, and then maybe number two, oddly enough, David Geffen. Good record men. And I would put Nesuhi Ertegun there; he touched a lot of bases.
MO OSTIN: Fascinating man, Nesuhi. Everybody adored the guy. Very honest, spoke his mind, always up front about what he felt. He had a great sense of art as well as music. Really a very, very highly cultured individual. Incredible intellect. Studied at the Sorbonne. In terms of music, he covered the international world. He would find things abroad that were just fantastic. And he got along with artists.
STAN CORNYN: About Mo, the first thing that comes to mind is his engaging curiosity and respect for intelligent people. He knew how to gather talented people, listen to them, indulge them, support them, challenge them.
MO OSTIN: Joe Smith—very witty, incredibly funny, incredibly smart, also well educated.
STAN CORNYN: Joe Smith, Yale graduate; Mo Ostin, UCLA graduate with honors; Ahmet, St. John's College graduate. These weren't high school ruffians.
MO OSTIN: And Jerry Wexler I found very intellectual, with great perspective on things.
JAC: At the NARM convention in Miami in 1970 there was a famous exchange between Jerry (who vied with Joe Smith for best mouth in our music group), and an "over-his-belt" rack jobber whose face wore the life he had lived. This gentleman, whose experience with recordings was a fraction of Jerry's, rises and talks about records as if they are toothpaste or other drug store commodity. Jerry, in a response I will always cherish, says, "You're talking about music. People have to create these albums. They don't spring fullblown from Minerva's ear." Few in the auditorium get the classical reference, deliberately misquoted, except me, Ahmet (another St. John's College boy), and Joe. The rack jobber, with absolutely no notion of what Jerry is talking about, says, "No, no, Mr. Wexler, you don't understand. We sell eighty-five percent of what you make." And Jerry, smooth as can be, like the most beautiful return of a master tennis player, says, "And we make one hundred percent of what you sell." I am transported.
JOE SMITH: Our board meetings were tremendous fun, hilarious. Much of what was discussed was pedestrian, about distribution or manufacturing or something like that. Then we would get into something juicy, where we could assassinate characters, and then you saw the best and worst of everybody, just attacking constantly.
Once we were sitting with Ted Ashley. Ted was the ultimate agent. Warners had bought his agency, and that was the beginning of the whole Warner group. The name of an agent from William Morris came up. Jerry Wexler got up—
JAC:—Swelled up—
JOE SMITH:—And started to scream all this venom: "He's an agent, he's the lowest form of human being." He gave all the bad agent lines, and the blood was draining out of Ashley's face. Jac and I were next to Wexler, trying to sit him down, and he noticed this total silence, and he said to Jac and me, "I probably said something wrong." Wexler was vicious, Ahmet was merciless, and I was always there to back them up, the vicious and the ferocious. The addition of David Geffen put a new edge on it, a little harder edge.
JAC: Geffen was not yet a division head within the music group and didn't attend all meetings, but he was clearly a rapidly rising star. Steve Ross was intrigued by David's quickness and similarity to himself, and Ahmet was hooked.
STAN CORNYN: Ahmet was probably entertained by the questions, by the intelligence, by the humor of David Geffen.
MO OSTIN: Geffen enters by starting a label with Ahmet at Atlantic called Asylum Records.
JOE SMITH: David sometimes can play district attorney. He was a challenger and a provoker. He could really shake you up.
JAC: Geffen could outsmart and outscream even Ahmet.
ALAN COHEN: David's absolutely blasphemous. Nothing's sacred or holy to him. Imagine—you're dealing with a bunch of people, basically nothing is sacred to them to begin with, that's the nature of the contemporary music business and then you have Geffen, who'll almost say outrageous things just for the benefit of hearing them and seeing the reactions.
STAN CORNYN: And his focus, the intensity, the ambition to win.
MO OSTIN: Incredibly aggressive, so intense, and there was this amazing brilliance that comes from the guy. All of this—it had to really make you think, "Boy, this guy is a comer."
STAN CORNYN: David is consumed with the business he's in, like, "There's only so much fuel in this business, and once I have burned it by focusing the rays of my attention on it, and when there's nothing more combustible left, I'm bored, I'm going to move on."
ALAN COHEN: So you have David. And you have the drive and entrepreneurial attitude of Mo Ostin and Joe Smith, and of Ahmet—his greed, his singlemindedness, his combativeness. Nesuhi was unlike Ahmet, a much stabler and less volatile person. Ahmet was a very successful businessman, but he also had more of the impresario, the flakiness, what have you, all the different elements that you would expect of someone running a recording company with its origins in jazz.
DAVID BRAUN: Ahmet has a bit of a scoundrel in him.
Jac, Mo Ostin and Joe Smith (left to right)
ALAN COHEN: And then Jac. Jac always seemed to me to be more of a straight arrow than other people in the record business, emotionally much less outgoing, much more reserved. Jac was not a killer in the same way Ahmet and David were. His was a different direction, a different bent. I think the Nonesuch label typified Jac. He was a combination of Nonesuch and the Doors, if you will.
Jac had his own roster and niche. Elektra was a niche company, whereas Atlantic and Warners were both trying to be broad contemporary music companies.
JAC: Even though we were the boutique label within the group—and wanted to be—out of brute necessity we had to compete in marketing, sales, radio play. Warner and Atlantic had loud voices. Elektra had to make itself heard in that crowd.
ALAN COHEN: Of course there was competition. Warner, Atlantic, and Elektra—three separate competitive companies.
MO OSTIN: It was not unlike General Motors with Chevy and Buick and Pontiac and Cadillac. We fought and competed against another. Very, very hard.
ALAN COHEN: Bidding for the same artists. Nobody restricting their bidding. And they were making independent judgments. They were making tons of money, increasing and growing at a rapid rate. And doing their own things.
BOB ZACHARY: Jac would send me to England to find talent, and write me long memos, super-explicit instructions, what kind of cassette recorder to take, what kind of film, check at the police station to ask about street singers. He had tremendous energy. My first trip to London, we flew overnight. I was twenty-five, he was fifteen years older than me. I was too excited to sleep on the plane. We got to the hotel and I crashed. Five minutes later the phone rings and Jac says, "Are you ready?" And in twenty-four hours I have met the Who, George Martin, Jane Asher, and gone to the Judy Collins concert at the Albert Hall.
JOE SMITH: We're brothers, but we're trying to beat each other's brains out all the time for an act.
MO OSTIN: We all killed for anything that we thought was worth signing.
ALAN COHEN: One of the great lines I remember from those meetings was Ahmet saying to Joe Smith, "Joe, I'm going over to Europe next week. Is there anything I can do for you?" And Joe said, "Ahmet, there's nothing you can do for me. I just ask you not to do anything to me."
JOE SMITH: We went head to head. We used to always battle for acts in England. This was open warfare.
We tried to establish some ground rules: whoever got there first had it. We would always sneak in. If we heard Atlantic was in there, we got in there too. But Ahmet would trick you into announcing your dates, and then he would pre-date by a day. You would say, "I saw him on Thursday, January 10." And Ahmet would say, "Ah, I was there on Tuesday, January 8, so he's ours." So I suggested to Ahmet that his story should be that he used to date a woman in England and he made her promise that if she ever had a child that became a singer, that the child would sign with Atlantic Records—that even before the child was conceived, Ahmet had made his connection.
JAC: I would marvel at Ahmet. He had the stamina of a rhino, could work all day, party all night, lock his legs and fall asleep standing up for fifteen minutes, or catnap on a company plane, then wake and pick up in the middle of a sentence.
During the last week of August, 1970, Ahmet and I were in London to discuss recording the Isle of Wight festival, the big European outdoor festival of the summer, featuring Jimi Hendrix (twelve days before he OD'd); the Who; Jethro Tull; Alvin Lee and Ten Years After; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Joni Mitchell; Kris Kristofferson; Miles Davis; Tiny Tim; to name but a few, and the Doors, with the bearded and bulky Jim Morrison.
Ahmet and I are to meet at nine in the morning. He is at the Dorchester, and I spot the WEA limo outside, a stretch Daimler, with our loyal driver, Dennis Goodman, napping at the wheel. From this I deduce that Ahmet has been out late but is now in. Ahmet is installed in the Oliver Messel suite, which he adores, but his mind is not on the Isle of Wight. Ahmet has been chasing Mick Jagger for over a year, trying to bring the Stones to Atlantic. He gets on the phone to Mick and recaps what a great evening they just shared, fabulous music, wonderful ladies, and isn't it time they sat down with Prince Rupert von Loewenstein, the Stones' manager, to cut a deal. By this time Ahmet felt that he had invested everything needed for Mick to make an informed decision. Mick says he will be happy to talk to Ahmet about the Stones recording for Atlantic—just as soon as he has spoken to Clive Davis at Columbia. And Mick hangs up.
Ahmet goes ballistic. Before my eyes he is slowly, and uncharacteristically, coming unhinged, really pissed but struggling to regain control. Then a beatific calm smoothes the angry lines in his face and he picks up the phone, very deliberately dials, and says, "Mick, I can understand that you want to talk to Clive Davis, and you should. But I want you to know that I can only make one Stones-size deal this year, and it's either you"—long exquisitely timed pause—"or Paul Revere and the Raiders." And he hangs up. Twenty seconds later the phone rings. We both know it's Mick, but Ahmet doesn't pick up. We go back to talking about the Isle of Wight. Ahmet was the greatest poker player in the business. He loved the game and took more joy in it than anyone. And at WEA he had other people's money to play with and that made it particularly wonderful. He was serious about the music, but he went about the business of music cavalierly, in the best sense of that word, with a style unmatched to this day. The Stones came to Atlantic. Of course.
JOE SMITH: Jac, who was the smartest of us all, took things more seriously than the rest of us and wasn't as quick on the trigger with humor. As a result, he would sometimes get caught in the crossfire.
Being rather formal in his way, he would present position papers on things that he had carefully researched, as he always does. We had short attention spans, there would be some jokes, and we could just attack him mercilessly, with the kind of humor that Ahmet can lay out and that I, on occasion, can be known to wield. Jac at first was very taken aback by our attitude, constantly in a position of having to step back—"Can't you guys ever be serious?" And Mo and I and Ahmet would just mock anger all the time.
There was this one meeting where Jac had been to England to do a review of our English operation, and he had slightly terrorized the English company, which was first of all a Warner company, and then Atlantic came in, and then Elektra.
Jac used to make notes on the things that he saw that were going wrong. Certainly not the best way for people to work, under the watchful eye of someone taking notes. We had heard about the discomfort there, and Jac came back to a meeting, really prepared. He had this report and as he was handing out copies he was prefacing it, saying, "As you probably know, I have been to England, and I am not very happy with our English company." He's about to set sail into his report when Ahmet said, "And, as you should probably know, man, our English company isn't very happy with you." So Jac immediately became defensive and it destroyed his whole posture.
JAC: I was pretty wrapped up in myself and these guys took some getting used to. After I had been in the group for about nine months, Ahmet and I were at a party in London and we sat down and talked, just friends, no attitude and no competition. It was Ahmet's way of finally allowing me to feel welcome. But there were still problems in England.
IAN RALFINI: I was running the company there, and it was very hard. I mean, Ahmet ran Atlantic, Mo and Joe ran Warners together, and Jac ran Elektra, completely autonomous. But in England everything was fed through this one company, WEA. Consequently, I'm there in the middle of all these people, who are coming at me every which way.
You've got Warners, with this—to me—easy music to understand, relate to, and decide on how to work. You've got Atlantic coming at me with R&B, and it's very different and has to be treated in a different way, and they've got a different kind of people. The Atlantic people that they chose didn't marry at all well with the Warners people, and also didn't marry terribly well with Elektra.
It was quite difficult at times to try to balance all that. Jac naturally wanted the attention for Judy Collins and the Doors and Bread and whoever. Ahmet wanted to make sure he had the best shot for Aretha Franklin. And there was Mo coming in with the James Taylors. You had very strong personalities. And I had to try to allocate resources because it was my staff working on all the records. There was no separation, there was no label manager identity. So we banged heads for a couple of years.
JAC: I thought the English setup was just dumb. The UK company decided to take what had been three highly individualistic labels that fiercely maintained their independence and group them within a marketing wrapper called "The Kinney Collection." I went nuts. Ahmet, Mo, and Joe didn't like it either, but I was so loud and contemptuous they let me take the heat. Ian was a great guy and a very skilled artist relations person. But I hated to see Elektra presented as anything other than singular.
IAN RALFINI: Jac had the smallest label. Elektra was this little gem. Very special, very attractive, a tremendous sort of prestige. But it wasn't a label that you found all over the charts all the time. It was like Jac's people, Jac's taste in music.
CLIVE SELWOOD: With Elektra acts we ran into a blank on radio, apart from one DJ, John Peel, who was on pirate radio. He would take Love and play it nonstop, and he did the same with the Incredible String Band, and the Doors. When they closed pirate radio down, John got a job on BBC Radio One, two hours a week, and that was the only time any kind of progressive music, Elektra music, got played.
JOE SMITH: Going into the Seventies, when we were Deep Purpling and Black Sabbathing and King Crimsoning and Led Zeppelining and all those things, Jac wasn't very visible in that, and hadn't chosen to be.
JAC: I wasn't into noise. If I didn't get the music, we didn't record it. At the same time, if I was going to be able to sign a major group in England, with Ahmet, Mo and Joe getting first crack at most everything that came through the UK office, I would have to find it myself, as surreptitiously as possible, and without any help from our English company.
IAN RALFINI: Elektra in England needed nurturing, but with the pressure on everybody there wasn't time to stop and do it. The three companies weren't of equal size, but in Jac's mind he was of equal size to the other executives, and therefore he wanted everything to be the same. He had to have strength. It was like he was fighting all of them on his own doorstep.
Every time he came to the office, it was always something he wasn't happy about. I mean, he let everybody know about it. Jac wanted it done his way. He was organized, he had his Filofax, and he laid it out. He was on top of everything. He would look at everything, the press releases, every piece of information that went out, and he followed through. He knew every detail, and he assumed that everybody else would know it too. Jac is a very intelligent person. He has a great vocabulary, and I'd know when he left the room that we had been castigated or praised.
We'd go to extreme lengths to get things right, really bent over backwards and tried, that's how sensitive we were to his needs. And unlike the other companies, it was always "him." With the others, it was, "I've got to satisfy Warners, I've got to satisfy Atlantic." With Jac, it was Jac. I remember one of the first things someone said to me: "When dealing with Jac, you have to remember you have to spell Jac with a C, Holzman with a Z, and you have to remember Elektra has a K."
We did a big promotion for Elektra at the Mayfair Hotel. We bought the restaurant for the evening, invited all the staff, DJs, everyone in the media. We flew some people in from America, Mel Posner, a lot of the Elektra staff. Nesuhi was there, representing WEA, and Phil Rose, managing director of WEA International. And Jac, of course.
We had ordered this enormous cake, about three feet by three and a foot high, with candles and a sugar Elektra butterfly. One side is the WEA logo, another is the Warner-Reprise logo, another the Atlantic logo, and finally the Elektra logo. The cake arrives. They put it down on the table, and Phil says, "Turn it around." So they turn it around. Phil says, "No, no, turn it around—get the Elektra logo in front." And would you believe, there was a WEA logo, an Atlantic logo, and two Warner-Reprise logos—and no Elektra logo!
I thought Phil, who is this very quiet Canadian, was going to have a heart attack. He was having a cholesterol problem and he was not eating cream or butter or eggs and all that . . . cake. But quickly he starts on the icing. He's eating like a pig. It was like this whole side of the cake was destroyed, and he was going to say the Elektra logo was on that side.
JAC: Poor Phil, the insult to his arteries was in vain. I cut the cake but never noticed the inscription.
