If I’d have continued it might have killed me. My doctor said I should stick to wine.
AHMET ERTEGUNI should have gotten the Beatles. But one of my lawyers kind of messed up.
More Ahmet Ertegun Quotes
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You know you have a multimillion-seller hit – and what you’re working on suddenly has magic.
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People like Clyde McPhatter who came out of the black churches – like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin – were all church singers who became great pop singers because gospel singing is very close to the blues.
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Laura had an instinctive feel for music and melody, and her delivery was sensational.
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The songwriters whom we think of being the greatest songwriters usually write one hit and six or seven flops.
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I used to drink a bottle of vodka a day, every day, for about 40 years and it never occurred to me it’d kill me.
AHMET ERTEGUN -
It is a great life, this life of music.
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I consider Laura to be one of my best signings, and I am proud to have had such a great singer in my career in the record business. We miss her dearly.
AHMET ERTEGUN -
Ataturk saw where history was going. He really did in Turkey what we are all hoping somebody will do in [Islamic] countries where fundamentalists thrive, that they get somebody today that has the vision that Ataturk had in 1915.
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Theres two kinds of music: black soul music, and the white imitation thereof.
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I’ve been in the studio when you go through a track and you run down a track and you know even before the singer starts singing, you know the track is swinging.
AHMET ERTEGUN -
I came close to signing Elvis Presley. I offered $25,000 for his contract and they asked for $45,000 and I just didn’t have the other $20,000.
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My first wife was a theater person.
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I first heard Laura Branigan sing live in my brother Nesuhi’s apartment, where we had gone because he had a very good piano. I immediately realized that she had a great pop voice, in the classical sense.
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Whenever a songwriter writes a big hit, then the next 20 songs they write – no matter how bad they are – get recorded.
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The first time I heard Clyde McPhatter singing with the Dominoes at the Apollo I just fell off my chair
AHMET ERTEGUN