This is the second of two posts inspired by an autobiography by Jerry Wexler and David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in Music. Jerry Wexler, along with Ahmet Ertegun was the management of Atlantic Records: he was the salty one, Ertegun the butter.
Don’t Need You No More-Allman Brothers Band
Soothe Me (live)-Sam and Dave
Don’t Play That Song-Aretha Franklin
One Way Ticket-Aretha Franklin
Walking on Gilded Splinters-Doctor John
It’s All Over-Wilson Pickett
There is a mix of songs here that is now downloadable with a right click (the last post’s music is also now downloadable).
One of the reasons that Atlantic lasted longer than any of the independent R&B labels was that Wexler and Ertegun adjusted to the rapidly changing opportunities in popular music. In the late fifties they began bringing in talented staff producers, first Lieber and Stoller (Charlie Brown-The Coasters) and then Bert Berns (Under the Boardwalk—Drifters). Wexler kept producing too, sticking to his main line, R&B. He also initiated a relationship with Stax Records based on a distribution deal that led to hits with Sam and Dave and that also opened his interest in southern soul.
But Wexler wasn’t always good at business: at his instigation, they sold the company in the late sixties to Warner/Seven-Arts for US$17.5, what Wexler (and a lot of other people) later thought was about half its value. Wexler, the street smart guy who grew up in depression era NY had misgivings about the long term viability of the music business and argued that it was time to cash out—right on the brink of the business’ and Atlantic’s exponential growth in the late sixties and seventies: Wexler produced Aretha Franklin’s first record that same year—not for Atlantic but for Atlantic as part of Warner Brothers.
The sale amped up what were already serious differences between Wexler and Ertegun. Up to then they had been completely independent—Wexler said “despots”—and that suited both of them well. After the sale they were managers at a music industry conglomerate soon owned by Kinney, originally a parking lot operator. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Ertegun was very talented in that environment while Wexler rubbed just about everyone the wrong way. That rough weather exacerbated Wexler and Ertegun’s personal differences. Ertegun began to be interested in the possibilities that lay in rock and signed Buffalo Springfield and then Crosby Stills and Nash, Cream and finally Led Zeppelin. The Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion had the Woodstock album.
Wexler stayed with soul music, produced Wilson Pickett, first at Stax and then at Muscle Shoals, and produced all of Aretha Franklin’s miraculous albums of the sixties and early seventies. This was beginning to not be Ahmet’s scene: Otis Redding pretended he couldn’t say his name and called him “Omelet.” It’s also likely that Ertegun saw more clearly that an industry built on white men recording (and profiting from) black music was going to have to make some possibly difficult changes in the era of Black Power. Wexler writes of black friends hustling him out of the infamous August 1968 NATRA meetings in Miami after they heard death threats. He was hung in effigy. You could also see the differences in the two men’s backgrounds becoming more significant: the street smart Jewish kid from Manhattan who squeaked through high school and the multilingual son of an ambassador who grew up in the Turkish embassy in Washington.
But they were both huge music fans and also….I think this is significant…readers. In an article by George W. S. Trow that ran in the New Yorker, Ertegun sings the praises of the Delage automobile, something he almost certainly picked up from James Salter’s A Sport and A Pastime (a great book, incidentally) and a nice note in his performance of class, whether you recognized it or not. Wexler also read widely and it shows in the verbal skills that made him a sought after elder statesman of R&B, a good and accessible interview with great stories. But “wanna” and “have” are different places to start from and the foundation influences everything.
Still, Wexler continued to turn out awesome music (Aretha) but found his personality is a problem in board rooms. He opened his own Criteria Studio in Miami and played an important role in the white blues guitar band fever of the late sixties and seventies recording Eric Clapton, Delaney and Bonnie, the Allmans and Doctor John. A lot of the legendary interplay between Duane Allman and Eric Clapton happened at Criteria, produced by Tom Dowd and as far from New York as Wexler could easily manage. But as the decade continued, fewer people were interested in white guys jamming the blues and the kind of music he excelled at producing faded against the lightning of punk (never mentioned), the twitter of disco (ditto) and the glam of new wave (also ditto).
Ertegun became a king maker. In the high rolling and mostly personal relations of the seventies record business, he was an emperor. He had Led Zeppelin and then the Rolling Stones on the label (Led Zeppelin’s contract specified that Atlantic management was not allowed in the studio when they were recording. Whether this was aimed at Ertegun, Wexler or someone else it is revealing). He excelled at the jet set and coke scene and had a knowledge and ease in the business that others could not compete with. In his article on Ertegun, George Trow writes, “Successful people in the music business were familiar with styles you could buy —black groups under contract and expensive department stores did not, generally speaking, terrify them—but Ahmet seemed to have an easy familiarity with styles you could come by only through instinct or inheritance, and this made it seem likely to the men in the business that he existed in a state of special grace.” Imagine. There’s a famous anecdote in Trow’s article that gets it all. “Do they have recording studios in France?” [David] Geffen asked Ahmet. “France is like Brooklyn,” Ahmet said. “They have everything.”
Ertegun remained a force majeure in the industry right up to his death. Wexler ran up a 40 year string of amazing records and grew into a comfortable retirement, still giving interviews, still able to spin great stories about the amazing talents that he had known and worked with through his long life in the music he had christened “rhythm and blues” back in 1948.