GAY BEFORE ITS TIME

ANOTHER CHAPTER FROM MY BOOK ‘SOUR MOUTH, SWEET BOTTOM’. YOU CAN GET IT FROM AMAZON (OR JUST ABOUT ANYWHERE ELSE).

I first met Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun in 1965. Atlantic Records was booming and their days of having to share a burger for lunch were behind them forever. The two brothers so enjoyed running the company the way they wanted to, it was impossible to believe that a couple of years later they’d decide to sell out to Warner. But they did. Though unsurprisingly, they hardly changed a bit.

I got on well with them, though probably everyone did, they were life affirmers – fun, outward, generous and determinedly successful - super well-educated, trilingual, art loving and as well read as anyone I’d ever met.

Of the two, I seemed to get on better with Nesuhi. He was less extrovert, less in need of having to prove he could be stoned all night yet still make a 9 a.m. meeting in the Warner boardroom. So it was a pleasure when I bumped into him in the Delta Airways lounge at Atlanta airport, both of us with an hour to pass till our flights left.

This was 46 years ago, in July 1977, the morning after New York had suffered a twenty-four-hour blackout. No one was talking about anything else, yet we didn’t even mention it, just talked about jazz. I’d been intoxicated with it as a teenager; Nesuhi still was as an adult. I told him how, when I was nineteen, I’d played in a band led by Oscar Peterson’s brother Chuck, in Montreal. Chuck had lost a hand somewhere along the way and had a glove-covered aluminium one at the end of one arm, but he played the trumpet just fine, holding and fingering it one-handed.

‘Did Oscar ever come and join you?’ Nesuhi asked.

‘Once,’ I said. ‘And I fled. I couldn’t stay on the bandstand with him there, it was too embarrassing. I was a fake. A good- looking white boy who’d learned a bit of trumpet and could get by providing no one in the audience knew any better.’

Nesuhi laughed. ‘Sometimes it’s hard not being black, isn’t it?’

I agreed. ‘You and Ahmet must have felt that often. When you started Atlantic Records and used to hang out in Harlem every night, didn’t you sometimes wish you were?’

‘All the time,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve often felt it with Jewish people, and gay people, too. I find myself thinking, what a pity I’m not.’

For no reason in particular an idea jumped into my head. I said, ‘Listen, Nesuhi, there’s an idea I’ve had brewing for some time...’

It hadn’t been. I was inventing it there and then.

I asked him, ‘Wouldn’t this be the perfect time for a major record company to find a top-class gay artist and promote them exactly as that – gay. Have them sing love songs to their own gender. Imagine if a new Luther Vandross did that. Or a new Bowie or Elton. It’s too late now for them to change. Too difficult. But a new artist who did it right from the start, especially a ballad singer − a white gay Sinatra, for instance.’

Nesuhi loved the idea, more than I did myself. I’d only thought it up as I was telling it to him and I hadn’t yet had time to consider if it was any good or not. I was forever getting ideas I threw out to record company executives. Get one right and I had a well funded project. And if no one liked it, I’d just throw it in the bin and think up another one.

When he left me to catch his flight Nesuhi was still going on about it, which was embarrassing for an idea I hadn’t yet thought through properly.

In Billboard the following week there was an interview with Nesuhi in which he said he’d met me at the airport and I’d given him an idea that could change the future of pop music for many of today’s up-and-coming artists.

A week later, Nesuhi called me in Paris, where I was living. ‘We’re going to do it,’ he said. ‘Ahmet says we’re not, but I’ve told him we are. It’s brilliant. We want you to join us for a conference call.’

I did. And Ahmet plunged straight in with negatives. ‘It’s a horrible idea. It’ll never work. And it’s been tried before.’

‘When?’ Nesuhi asked.

‘Frank Sinatra did it,’ Ahmet said. ‘With that album he made with Rod McKuen – A Lonely Man. That was a gay album, pure and simple. And it was his worst selling album ever.’

‘But you’re missing the point,’ I told him. ‘The idea is to have a gay person sing the songs and to sing them to their own gender. Everyone knows Sinatra isn’t gay. He was singing the songs to women. It’s just that they were written by someone gay.’

After that I heard nothing more from either of them. The idea seemed to have gone the way of so many of my quickly thought up schemes, which was fine because there were plenty more where it came from.

Several months later I bumped into Ahmet at a concert in Hyde Park. He said, ‘You owe me a thank-you.’

‘For what!’ I asked.

‘For saving you from that dreadful idea of Nesuhi’s.’

‘It wasn’t his idea, it was mine.’

‘Yes,’ Ahmet conceded. ‘But for you it was just a crazy thought that suddenly came into your head. For Nesuhi it was something he took seriously. For a while he was quite obsessed with it. But I put the kibosh on it. So you owe me a thank-you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it wouldn’t have worked. You’d have been connected with a big failure and anyway you didn’t really believe in it.’

‘Yes, I did,’ I said defensively. ‘It may have been a quick idea but it was a damned good one.’

Ahmet shook his head. ‘No, it wasn’t. It was shit. And you know it. No one wants to hear male singers sing love songs to a “he”. It’s not a matter of being gay or straight, it’s a matter of tradition, of feeling comfortable, of what we’re used to. It would just feel awkward. Try singing it in your head − it feels clumsy.’

He was persuasive. And at that moment I think I was probably won over.

But now, forty years later, we’ve begun to hear gay singers sing with same gender pronouns and it’s not at all like Ahmet said. Granted, when the songs are ones we’ve always known and got used to hearing in a non-gay context, it sometimes feels awkward. But when the songs are written that way in the first place, and it’s the singers themselves who wrote them. When the words come from Lil Nas X, Sam Smith or Rina Sanwayam - it gives them an honesty and freshness that works perfectly.

Even so, I doubt that Nesuhi could have made it work forty years ago. Like most big changes, it needed time to evolve at its own pace.

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