Among many talents, Ahmet Ertegun was a witty raconteur, often making himself
the butt of his stories. One of his favourite anecdotes was about the summer
in the 1970s when he was holidaying on a Caribbean island. Mick Jagger and
the comedian Richard Pryor were among the other visiting glitterati. Ahmet
made inquiries to determine the most prestigious club to which he could take
them. He was informed that there was a superb, very exclusive club that was
primarily for upscale gays. But, great music, food and wines. He picked up
Jagger and Pryor and turned up at the club. The local bouncer was most
apologetic but firm. It didn’t matter that Ahmet was chairman of Atlantic
Records, it was a members-only club. Neither he nor his companions could
enter. As Ahmet turned away, he was surprised to see Jagger swished into the
club, leaving Ahmet and Pryor dumbfounded and stranded on the portal.
Ahmet used to finish the story with a mischievous twinkle: “I guess Mick was a
member . . .”
Ahmet, who died a year ago, was more than a good story. He was the beginning,
the middle and above all the hope. Because, regardless of his famous
sophisticated drollery, he started as an outsider. Atlantic Records was
formed in 1949 by two highbred young Turks, Ahmet and brother Nesuhi, in
1949. “When I started out in the business,” Ahmet said, “I had to produce. I
was immediately successful at the age of 23 because the people who were in
their fifties had no idea what was going on in the street.”
The most endearing image I have of Atlantic Records is the black-and-white
footage shot in its Manhattan office, showing desks being pushed against the
wall, tape recorders and mikes being placed and a session kicking in. In the
beginning Atlantic had the artists, Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, the Coasters,
Clarence Carter, the Drifters, Bobby Darin, but perhaps Ahmet Ertegun’s
equal gift as a Svengali-style leader was how he cast his company.
The roll-call of Atlantic producers, arrangers, songwriters and engineers is
the basis of our very music. Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin, Tom Dowd, Bert
Berns; and the partnerships of Mort Shuman & Doc Pomus and Jerry Leiber &
Mike Stoller. The Ahmet Ertegun-led Atlantic team and the music they made
were our stairway to heaven.
I had no idea of what it took to be a manager when I met the Rolling Stones in
1963. It actually didn’t matter. It’s the idea that matters and the idea was
the band. I was fascinated by the idea of svengalism. The origin of the word
is the character Svengali in Gerald du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby.
The character was a musician, hypnotist and rogue. From the age of 9 my
dream had been the underground posters that seduced me with “Mike Todd
presents” or “Otto Preminger presents”. I was always more interested in the
name above the title. Svengali is defined as someone who “lures talented
people with grand promises yet gives them little lasting operational
authority”. Just like politics, only better paid.
The music boom of the late Fifties and Sixties was guided by so-called
svengalis for the benefit (mainly) of musicians. Unless of course they
succumbed to illness, drugs, drink, madness or murder. Or had a talent that
just ran its course. A few are still standing: Marty Wilde, Cliff Richard,
Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Ringo, Pete Townshend, the Rolling Stones. As
David Crosby (of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Anybody) told me a few years
ago: “If you’re over 50, can stand up straight and remember the words, there
is work for everybody.”
In 1962 I was an independent publicist. I had already admired a few svengalis
from afar. Mike Todd I first glimpsed in a British newspaper striding
triumphantly into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Pipe in one hand, his wife
Elizabeth Taylor in the other. Todd had reinvented the cinema in 1956 with Around
the World in 80 Days. Miss Taylor was her own svengali, a result of her
teen years with the tycoon Louis B. Mayer at MGM. Along the way Mike Todd
polished her stone into its permanent shine, just as an obscure British
agent, Kenneth Hume, helped to remove the excesses of Tiger Bay, Cardiff,
from the future Dame Shirley Bassey.
There are no rules that define the svengali. Todd was a Yank and very
straight. Hume was British and very gay. The iconic Larry Parnes was
British, gay and very Jewish. Parnes gave the UK many of our pale answers to
Elvis – with feral surnames to make up for their pasty complexions: Tommy
Steele, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Georgie Fame.
I mention “gay” in that it was an important element in talent selection. The
main beneficiary of Parnes being gay was the public. Most of the colts in
Larry’s stable learnt their requisite three chords to score birds, not
fellas.
Parnes was the British Colonel Tom Parker, but while Parker chomped on just
one miraculous loaf – Elvis – Parnes multiplied his loaves into a
shoal of tight-trou-sered, stiff-quiffed crooning fishes.
As for publicists, there were only a few of us. It was not a regular job; it
was an escape from one. I was happy. I had represented a litany of talents:
Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, Little Richard and, in January of 1963, I added the
Beatles to my list. I got the Beatles gig because of right place, right
line. I got the Dylan gig because I went to his Marble Arch hotel room at
the Cumberland, knocked on the door and his manager Albert Grossman let me
in. And I mean let me in. Into their game.
He allowed me to sit at his table, and I sat in awe at the conspiratorial
knowing between manager Grossman and client Dylan. I never forgot it and I
used it. Grossman has, like so many svengalis and mentors, been airbrushed
out of his former artist’s CV. But it was Albert who gave the early Dylan
songs to his other clients Peter, Paul & Mary, who turned Blowin’ in
the Wind and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right into
international anthems, opening the door for Dylan to become one himself.
Back home Brian Epstein was a benevolent svengali. He did not have the bottle
for the second innings, but neither did I. We both finished the Sixties
exhausted. Brian’s was terminal. Eppy saw God when he spied the Beatles,
with John the Baptist on lead. In 1962 he secured our rock’n’ roll music as
the globe’s lingua fran-ca when he landed a recording contract for his
“boys”.
The act I saw God with was the Rolling Stones. Luckily, when the Stones
accepted my offer of management, I knew nothing. It would have ruined
everything if I’d had a plan. The group was the plan. Of course
I had an agenda. It started with attention. And ended with attention. I knew
that whom you idolise tells people who you are and who you want to be. I
knew that the Beatles were a manifestation of the nice lad that it’s OK to
take home to meet mum and dad. I knew that the Stones could be the opposite.
My Billy Fury. My Marlon Brando. My James Dean. I also knew that they could
go the distance.
So I svengalied the Rolling Stones. I told them who they were and, sure
enough, they became it. I also svengalied my second act, Marianne Faithfull.
But at the time she could not go the distance so I passed her off on a
partner. She was lost on stage. She still is. But now, God bless her, that
little bird has become a survivor. It’s part of her charm.
Then there was the recording side and it is here that the svengali came into
his own. The music business had used recordings primarily as a way to get
better-paying live gigs. After the Beatles arrived and after the public
started taking drugs, people needed time to toke, and the long-player
replaced the single. An amazing array of talent took over in recording
companies. It was pioneered by John Hammond at Columbia Records in New York,
followed closely by Ahmet Ertegun and brother Nesuhi; Jerry Leiber &
Mike Stoller; Phil Spector; George Martin; Mickie Most; Lou Adler; and the
street took over the music machine.
Yes, managers had been a rum, randy lot in the late Fifties. The Sixties were
more of the same. You just had to add drugs to the equation.
There were odd lads out. Chris Stamp for The Who, the Move’s Tony Secunda,
myself. We all loved drugs and committed the second sin: we hung with the
act. Chris Stamp’s partner, the inspirational Kit Lambert, had a Death in
Venice. He may have died of a cerebral haemorrhage at his mother’s London
home in 1981, but his death began upon being replaced by The Who in 1975,
whereupon Kit, heroin, booze and life-addled, retreated to a palazzo on the
Grand Canal in Venice and became Baron Lamberti. His partner Chris Stamp
survived and is now a Long Island shrink. Tony Secunda left England and
moved into literary circles.
The Seventies brought in the naff and the gangsters. A bunch of velveted,
chalk-striped “wotchas” who applied used-car ethics to used-rock stars. The
Eighties provided two bright entrepreneurial lights: Alan McGee, who guided
us to Oasis, and Paul McGuiness, who pilots U2.
It’s amazing how management has changed. Now it’s business acumen and
bean-counting. Bums on seats were the only sums I could do. And when the
Rolling Stones had finally become what I’d told them to become, they
certainly didn’t need me any more. Now they needed a principality of lawyers
and accountants.
The music hasn’t changed, only the decimal points. Look at the savings –
that’s what the act looks at. The music, lifestyle and technology that set
us free has now enslaved us to averageness. We are all experts. Everybody is
a star and the record companies are on the way out. Their last gasps are
fuelled by low-royalty back catalogue; raping young acts and screwing old
ones who can’t afford lawyers.
The svengali has met his demise primarily because of technology and the
incredible amount of media and sales points that have to be served. Now it’s
the acts that have to sell themselves. They have to understand the game,
understand themselves as a brand. They have to manage their space as well as
MySpace.
Nobody is interested in someone else speaking for Bono. He has to spread his
wings and explain himself. And he does it very well. Paul McCartney is still
a Beatle – the keeper of the castle. And Keith Richards remains just
like a Rolling Stone. Most of the rest are amateurs walking the tabloid
plank. Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse are only addicted pawns in the game.
Britney Spears is merely today’s Mar-ilyn Monroe. The talent isn’t even an
issue. They do have the flab and the rehab in common, as well as being
blessed by the love of the camera.
Artists have always been chaotic and self-destructive. Few have been as
self-disciplined as Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney. Unless controlled, an
artist cannot discern between the roar of the crowd and the smell of the
greasy headline at the breakfast table. It’s all “attention”. That has
replaced record sales as the route to money on the road. But the road is
tough and a harsh mistress. You respect it or you’re roadkill.
The men behind the music-makers
Colonel Tom Parker
The toughest manager since Cardinal Richelieu, according to one critic, a
former dog catcher (born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, and never a colonel).
Parker’s ruthless control of his client made Elvis the highest paid
entertainer and a cultural phenomenon.
Brian Epstein
The architect of Beatlemania, and a former Liverpool shopkeeper, Epstein
arguably invented “stadium rock” with the band’s Hollywood Bowl concert, the
first of its kind.
Peter Grant
Grant was a sheet-metal factory worker, army corporal, bouncer and even a
wrestler, before finding fame as the hard-as-nails manager of bands
including the Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin and Bad Company. It was Grant who sent
an unknown singer called Robert Plant a telegram to see if he would audition
for a band he was putting together. Plant ripped it up but Grant persisted.
Kit Lambert
The composer’s son and Oxford graduate found and steered The Who to fame. In
Italy he was known as Baron Lamberti.
