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were living in the Dark Ages, he decided to become involved in the new science of tape recording. He cut his first hit in 1949 when he recorded vocalist Eileen Barton singing the insipid “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake,” a number one hit for National Records, not only one of the biggest-selling records by any independent label at the time, but also one of the records that made rock and roll necessary. Dowd was bringing uncommon audio clarity and balance to Atlantic’s records, the kind of care and attention to detail almost entirely unknown elsewhere in the rhythm and blues world.
    In February 1953, Uncle Sam called Abramson. After the Army had paid for his dental education, he was drafted and sent to Germany. On his way out of the country, the last thing he did for the label was rehearse bandleader Joe Morris in Montgomery, Alabama, working up a song with the band’s female vocalist, Faye Adams, called “Shake a Hand.” When nobody else from Atlantic moved to bring the band intothe studio, Morris took the record to Al Silver’s Herald label and had the biggest r&b hit of 1954.
    The most obvious candidate to replace Abramson was Jerry Wexler, the thirty-seven-year-old former Billboard magazine reporter who changed the name of the magazine’s charts from “Race Records” to “Rhythm and Blues” in 1949, literally naming the music. They were already all friends and spent weekends together at Fire Island. The Atlantic guys had offered him a job the year before running their publishing company, but without any participation in artists and repertoire, record production, or a piece of the action, Wexler demurred. This time they offered him $350 a week and a 13 percent share of Atlantic for a $2,000 investment. Ahmet spent the money on a new green Cadillac convertible for Wexler.
    Wexler had grown up insolent and conniving in the streets of Washington Heights. A street-smart wiseacre who spent more time in Artie’s Poolroom than any classroom, Wexler had read just enough books to be dangerous. His father was a Polish immigrant who worked his entire life as a window washer. His mother was a real character, a card-carrying Communist and modern woman with grand designs for her reprobate son. When he flunked out of college in New York, she sent him packing to Kansas State University, thinking he couldn’t get into trouble in the middle of all those cornfields, only to have her derelict, jazz-mad boy spend his time in gin mills in Kansas City, where he saw Big Joe Turner working as a singing bartender. He didn’t last the second year. He came home to a dismal life, ennobled solely by the grace of jazz. By day, he washed windows alongside his father. By night, he haunted the music emporiums of Fifty-Second Street and Harlem, far removed from the daylight drudgery as he shared a joint with his hipster friends in the basement of Jimmy Ryan’s.
    He was drafted during the war but served only in Florida and Texas. He completed his journalism degree at Kansas State after his discharge and moved back home to Washington Heights. He was thirtyyears old, married, living with his in-laws, yet to find his first real job. When he finally found work at the weekly music industry trade magazine Billboard , Wexler felt perfectly at home among the pluggers and cleffers on Broadway, the rack jobbers on Eleventh Avenue, hanging out at the bar at Birdland. He tipped Patti Page’s manager to a country song, “Tennessee Waltz,” that would make the girl thrush a major star. After he left Billboard for old-line publishers Robbins, Feist, Miller, Wexler introduced Columbia Records a&r director Mitch Miller to a couple of big numbers in 1951—“Cry” by Johnny Ray and “Cold, Cold Heart” by Tony Bennett, which took country songwriter Hank Williams into the pop charts for the first time. But Wexler hated his job, playing stooge to some old-time Alley sleazebag. He thought the Atlantic guys were the cognoscenti of the