Book Review: The Last Sultan by Robert Greenfield

Ahmet Ertegun, man of wealth and taste, was among the first of the great record moguls—and among the last

Ertegun, center, with Mick and Bianca Jagger. Atlantic signed the Rolling Stones in 1971 Julian Wasser/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

By Steven Daly

The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun
By Robert Greenfield
Simon and Schuster; 431 pp; $30.00
 

By the time Ahmet Ertegun signed the Rolling Stones to his Atlantic Records label in April 1971, the imprint had already launched superstars including Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Led Zeppelin, and fractious hippie supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young onto the global stage. When Ertegun died five years ago at 83, the world lost another member of the vanishing species known as the Record Man. The honorific refers to the group of executives (which included Island’s Chris Blackwell, Electra’s Jac Holzman, and Mo Ostin of Warner Bros.) who helped define the culture of their time by making decisions based on personal musical instincts rather than fiscal pragmatism.

Robert Greenfield, author of the new Ertegun biography, The Last Sultan, is a former Rolling Stone writer best-known for 1974’s S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with The Rolling Stones, about the Stones’ notorious 1972 U.S. tour. Greenfield’s portrait of Ertegun is an incisive and compelling account of the sometimes convoluted story of how Atlantic Records became possibly the most respected label in the business.

Despite its title, The Last Sultan evinces none of the triumphalism that one has come to expect from big-ticket rock books—chiefly because Atlantic’s triumph was forged steadily over several decades, during which the company occasionally came close to melt-down. For instance, after Elvis Presley transformed the music world almost overnight, Atlantic could have been left high and dry if Bobby Darin had not managed to slither up the pop chart in 1958 with the bouncy, Ertegun-produced Splish Splash.

As the son of a high-ranking Turkish diplomat, Ertegun was raised in London, Paris, and Switzerland before his father became Turkey’s ambassador to the U.S. in 1934. Ahmet and his older brother, Nesuhi, were fanatical about black American music, acquiring some 25,000 records between them. The teenage Ahmet would frequent black-music venues in D.C., mixing with musicians twice his age; the ability to operate comfortably within disparate sociocultural milieus—perhaps inherited from his father—would ultimately become central to his success.

In 1947, Ertegun borrowed $12,500 from his family dentist and, along with a fellow True Believer named Herb Abramson, launched Atlantic Records. The label did respectable business as a rare source of raw rhythm and blues music during the post-war period, but it hit its stride with the acquisition of leather-lunged stalwart Ruth Brown and had its first breakout hit with Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll. The record was a No. 1 R&B hit three months before Bill Haley’s cheerfully deracinated version took the mainstream world by storm.

Ertegun’s major breakthrough was the 1952 signing of Ray Charles, although it wasn’t until two years later that the label boss and his new partner, Jerry Wexler, a Bronx-born ex-Billboard reporter, cajoled the future icon into recording I Got a Woman, which became a No. 1 R&B track, the first of many hits Charles recorded for Atlantic.

Ertegun’s brother, Nesuhi, who’d been running his own jazz label in Los Angeles, joined Atlantic in 1956, adding new luster to the label by augmenting its roster with heavy-duty acts like John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Ertegun consciously cultivated a playboy image. In the 1950s he was a fixture at the fashionable nightclub El Morocco, and the early ’60s saw him slumming alongside the likes of Noël Coward and Jackie Kennedy at the seedy Peppermint Lounge, birthplace of a new dance craze called the Twist. In 1978 a lengthy and dazzling profile in the New Yorker officially granted Ertegun recognition as the jet-setting bohemian-in-chief of the record business.