Here Comes the Night (5 page)

When the Erteguns’ father died in 1944, he was initially buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and after the war, his body was shipped home with great pomp and ceremony by President Truman on the USS
Missouri
, only months after the Japanese signed the surrender on her decks. Their mother and sister went with their father. Nesuhi had married a gal who owned a record store and was working for a jazz record company in Los Angeles. Ahmet moved to more humble surroundings in DC—no more limousines, servants, or cooks—and continued to study for a master’s degree in philosophy in the evenings. He sold the massive record collection he and his brother accumulated to plump up the small allowance his family could afford. During the day, he spent a lot of time sitting around Waxie Maxie’s, a record store around the corner from the Howard Theatre in the black section of town.

These were Ahmet’s wilderness years, absorbing the business through osmosis while lounging around listening to records and doing nothing. Owner Max Silverman was a philosopher king who held forth on a wide array of topics. Ahmet took a second trip to the recording studio after Little Miss Cornshucks, upon meeting a potential partner in Maxie’s store, a square who put up the dough. Ahmet cut several sides with orchestra leader Boyd Raeburn, who ran a progressive big band working sort of a Stravinsky-meets-Kenton wrinkle. Again Ahmet had no plans for the recordings—he thought he might play them for his friend John Hammond, running artists and repertoire (a&r) at Mercury Records with Mitch Miller—but his partner made off with the masters.

Ahmet talked Waxie Maxie Silverman into bankrolling his next recording venture, but this time Ahmet brought along somebody who had actually made records before, Herb Abramson, a record collector
Ahmet had known since the embassy jam sessions. Abramson, working in A&R at National Records while studying dentistry at New York University under a grant from the army, was also a fashionable, handsome man-about-town. He had the added attraction of having made genuine records with Billy Eckstine, the Ravens, and Big Joe Turner, among others. Ertegun and Abramson were going to start two labels, Quality and Jubilee, one for jazz and the other for gospel, but didn’t get much further than cutting a couple of records that went nowhere. Abramson soldiered on with a new partner in Jubilee, bandleader Jerry Blaine, who wanted to make Jewish comedy records, but soon sold out.

Ahmet still wanted to start a label and make records. He buttonholed bandleader Lionel Hampton about raising money for a label, and the jazzman agreed, only to have his wife scotch the deal. Instead, Ahmet approached an Ertegun family friend, their dentist, Dr. Vahdi Sabit, who mortgaged his house and came up with $10,000 to back the play. Ahmet moved to New York and slept on the Abramsons’ living room couch. They changed the name of the company to Atlantic Records at the last minute after they discovered that the name Horizon Records had already been taken. They crossed out “Horizon” and wrote in “Atlantic” on the partnership papers. Abramson was named president; Ahmet vice president. Herb’s wife Miriam, also named vice president, managed the office and handled the accounting. The first session was conducted November 21, 1947, by a quartet called the Harlemaires, a vocal group they found through arranger Jesse Stone. Ahmet thought the gambit might last a couple of years.

Ahmet could not have predicted the cataclysmic musical and social tides that were going to sweep the label’s artists and records in only a few years into the foreground of American popular music. He didn’t even know how to make records; that was what Abramson was around to do. He was a slick hipster trying to make his hustle work. He was smart, educated, cultured, but the independent record game was no place for pantywaists and Ahmet wasn’t one of those either. Still, there
is no way he could have envisioned for himself the kind of success he would experience in very short order. Although the label would come to define the rhythm and blues era and Ahmet’s innate taste, elegance and sophistication never stood in the way of his deep appreciation of the funky blues—rather just the opposite—Atlantic did not start out with a program, a strategy, or even a specific kind of record the label intended to pursue.

In the first year, they made a variety of records. With ex–Lionel Hampton trumpeter Joe Morris, they cut “Lowe Groovin’,” an instrumental named after a Washington, DC, disc jockey that did well, aided by considerable airplay from the deejay in question, Jackson Lowe, and Ahmet’s old pal, Waxie Maxie Silverman, who played the record on the radio show he sponsored in exchange for free goods for his store. They recorded jazz pianist Erroll Garner. “Blue Harlem” by Tiny Grimes blared out of ghetto jukeboxes all over New York City. Ahmet learned well all those afternoons in Waxie Maxie’s that customers didn’t want fancy jazz; they wanted down and dirty blues records they could dance to. The company rented a $65-a-month ground-floor suite at the Hotel Jefferson on Fifty-Sixth Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Ahmet shared the bedroom with a Turkish poet and cousin who hung out with the Greenwich Village crowd, while the record company operated out of the other room. The hotel switchboard answered the phone and took messages, so they didn’t need to hire a secretary.

When their New Orleans distributor called looking for an obscure record he couldn’t find by Stick McGhee, Ahmet decided to record a version of his own and found the only McGhee he knew—bluesman Brownie McGhee—at home in Brooklyn. As it happened, the Stick McGee in question was Brownie’s brother, who was visiting him at the time. A session was arranged (brother Brownie played guitar and shouted along on the choruses), and the resulting record, “Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” was the label’s first hit record when it was released in February 1949. It sold seven hundred thousand copies.

Ertegun and Abramson went south that year to search out more real blues talent. New York musicians looked down on the earthy music and it was always a problem getting the New York cats to cut the kind of sides Ahmet wanted. He usually had to compromise and let them do two or three jazz numbers for every blues. They recognized Blind Willie McTell playing on the streets of Atlanta from his old 78s. They found the epochal New Orleans pianist called Professor Longhair playing at some dump in New Orleans white people never ventured into, only to learn he had been signed just days before by Mercury Records. They recorded him anyway.

The next time they went south, they brought with them arranger Jesse Stone, who had been working on Atlantic sessions since the first one. Grandson of a slave, raised in a show business family, Stone started performing at age four in a vaudeville dog act in the Midwest. He made his first record, “Starvation Blues,” in 1927 for Okeh Records. He knocked around Kansas City and came to New York in 1936, when Duke Ellington ran across the all-girl vocal group called the Rhythm Debs that Stone was leading in Detroit. Ellington landed the girls a job at the Cotton Club and laid his Harlem apartment on Stone rent-free.

Stone worked at the Apollo Theater, did arrangements for Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, and others. He helped start Louis Jordan. He took songwriting lessons from Cole Porter. His song “Idaho” was a Top Five pop hit for Benny Goodman in 1942, and Jimmy Dorsey made a big record out of his “Sorghum Switch.” He worked with Herb Abramson at National Records and was the only one of the Atlantic team who knew his way around sheet music.

Stone took notes on what he heard on that Southern trip and immediately applied what he learned to their New York recordings. When saxophonist Frank Culley showed up at Atlantic with a tune he called “Sergeant” that he claimed to have written, Stone immediately recognized it as his “Sorghum Switch” and gave it a spiffy new arrangement
and title, “Cole Slaw.” Culley’s record didn’t become a hit, but Louis Jordan took the tune Top Ten R&B in the summer of 1949.

Ertegun and Abramson signed a young singer named Ruth Brown, who was managed by Cab Calloway’s sister, after catching her act in a Washington, DC, club. Ahmet was particularly impressed by the way she handled the old Little Miss Cornshucks number “So Long.” On her way to New York City to make her debut at the Apollo and record for Atlantic, Brown was in a car crash that crushed both her legs. She spent months laid up in a Chester, Pennsylvania, hospital. Ahmet visited her on her twenty-first birthday to sign the contracts in her hospital bed. Atlantic paid her medical bills before she ever stepped into the studio. She was still on crutches and wearing leg braces when she finally did. Ahmet had her sing two songs on a four-song date with the Eddie Condon band. He held little commercial hope for Condon’s traditional jazz, but he also saw the session as an opportunity to expose a new singer. Of course, they did the Little Miss Cornshucks number, and the damn thing made the
Billboard
R&B Top Ten in 1949, the label’s second hit.

But it was the Jesse Stone arrangement for Ruth Brown’s “Teardrops from My Eyes” that smoothly blended the robust raunch of the New Orleans r&b with the svelte sound of the New York big bands. The baritone sax belches and shimmering brass slide in behind the beat. Stone plants a throbbing bass figure in the foreground to encourage dancers. Brown gives the song a fierce, bold delivery, and saxophonist Frank “Cole Slaw” Culley honks his guts out on the bridge. “Teardrops from My Eyes” hit number one on the r&b charts and was one of the best-selling r&b records of 1950. Ruth Brown—and Atlantic Records—had arrived.

Ahmet was not a fan of the vocal group sound and Atlantic had recorded little of it, but after the massive success of the Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon to Know” in 1950, vocal groups were too popular for Atlantic to ignore. Through a fellow they knew who worked at an independent
distributor in Washington, DC, the company signed the Clovers, a five-man group they auditioned in Waxie Maxie’s store. Ahmet wrote “Don’t You Know I Love You”—using the pen name Nugetre, or Ertegun spelled backward, to avoid possible embarrassment in the event he wound up pursuing a diplomatic career anytime in the future—and used Frank Culley’s band to back the group on the record date. Saxophones were a new touch for vocal group records. Ertegun thought the performance was more white, more Ink Spots, than he intended when he wrote the piece but realized the group turned the record into something special. “Don’t You Know I Love You” was another number one r&b hit for the label in 1951, followed immediately by another number one with “Fool, Fool, Fool,” a song Ertegun insisted the Clovers record against their wishes. It sounded better to them as it went up the charts.

In 1950 and 1951, Atlantic recorded Mary Lou Williams, the Billy Taylor Quartet, Leadbelly, Al Hibbler, Lil Green, Sidney Bechet, Meade Lux Lewis, and Mabel Mercer, among others. In July 1951, Ahmet and Abramson went to Chicago and recorded ailing pianist Jimmy Yancey, whose left arm was partly paralyzed, and some other notable local talent. While in Chicago, Ahmet was knocked out walking down Maxwell Street to see black people dancing to his Clovers song on portable record players.

Ahmet knew Kansas City blues shouter Big Joe Turner from concerts at the embassy. Abramson had recorded him at National Records, and Jesse Stone first met him as a teenager in Kansas City. When Ahmet heard Big Joe was subbing for an ailing Jimmy Rushing with the Count Basie Orchestra at the Apollo, he went to the show. Big Joe Turner was a force of nature, not a jazz singer. Turner didn’t know the material and kept coming in late and the band ended choruses before Big Joe did. The set was a train wreck. When Ahmet finally found the singer after the show, he was up the street already nursing a drink at Braddock’s Bar, miserable and dejected. Ahmet talked Turner into going with Atlantic and wrote him a song, “Chains of Love,” a rewrite of the old Albert
Ammons number, “Mecca Flat Blues” (Nugetre strikes again), that landed the roly-poly baritone at number two on the r&b charts in 1951.
*

Ruth Brown had the biggest rhythm and blues record of the year in 1953 for Atlantic with “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” a song that took considerable cajoling on Ahmet’s part to get her to record. They ran the session at a stage studio on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-Seventh Street, and along with arranger Jesse Stone, they brought in engineer Tom Dowd, a recording engineer they had come increasingly to rely on since the boyish Dowd first showed up as the unexpected substitute at an early Atlantic session at Apex Sound.

Dowd was a remarkable young man, a classically trained pianist who as a teen worked during the war on the secret Manhattan Project that developed the A-bomb. When he went back to college and found that the nuclear physics he learned making the bomb was still classified top secret and the professors were living in the Dark Ages, he decided to become involved in the new science of tape recording. He cut his first hit in 1949 when he recorded vocalist Eileen Barton singing the insipid “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake,” a number one hit for National Records, not only one of the biggest-selling records by any independent label at the time, but also one of the records that made rock and roll necessary. Dowd was bringing uncommon audio clarity and balance to Atlantic’s records, the kind of care and attention to detail almost entirely unknown elsewhere in the rhythm and blues world.

In February 1953, Uncle Sam called Abramson. After the Army had paid for his dental education, he was drafted and sent to Germany. On his way out of the country, the last thing he did for the label was rehearse bandleader Joe Morris in Montgomery, Alabama, working up a song with the band’s female vocalist, Faye Adams, called “Shake a Hand.” When nobody else from Atlantic moved to bring the band into
the studio, Morris took the record to Al Silver’s Herald label and had the biggest r&b hit of 1954.

The most obvious candidate to replace Abramson was Jerry Wexler, the thirty-seven-year-old former
Billboard
magazine reporter who changed the name of the magazine’s charts from “Race Records” to “Rhythm and Blues” in 1949, literally naming the music. They were already all friends and spent weekends together at Fire Island. The Atlantic guys had offered him a job the year before running their publishing company, but without any participation in artists and repertoire, record production, or a piece of the action, Wexler demurred. This time they offered him $350 a week and a 13 percent share of Atlantic for a $2,000 investment. Ahmet spent the money on a new green Cadillac convertible for Wexler.