Atlantic Records - The Rock Era

The Rock Era

In late October 1968 music manager Peter Grant flew to New York with tapes of the debut album by new British rock band Led Zeppelin and met with Ertegun and Wexler. A deal was quickly drawn up and on November 23 Atlantic issued a press release announcing the signing of the band to an exclusive five-year contract, one of the "most substantial" in the label's history; although not disclosed at the time, this included an advance of $US200,000. The band recorded directly for Atlantic Records from 1968 to 1973 and after that contract expired, they founded their own "vanity" label, Swan Song Records and signed a distribution deal with Atlantic (after being turned down by other labels). The arrival of Led Zeppelin proved timely for Atlantic's future as a rock label - one month after the Zeppelin signing, Atlantic's flagship rock act Cream played their farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London (supported, coincidentally, by another up-and-coming new band, Yes, who were themselves signed to Atlantic early the next year).

Following his departure from The Hollies, singer-songwriter Graham Nash met Stephen Stills (ex Buffalo Springfield) and David Crosby (ex The Byrds) at a party at the Los Angeles home of Cass Elliott in March 1968. When Nash sang with them their unique vocal chemistry was instantly apparent and this quickly led to them forming Crosby, Stills & Nash. After failing an audition for Apple Records, they went to Atlantic, who eagerly snapped them up and gave them virtually complete freedom to record their debut album. The signing was initially complicated by the fact that Nash was still nominally under contract to Epic Records (The Hollies' US distributor), but Ahmet Ertegun overcame this by arranging a 'swap' - he released former Buffalo Spingfield member Richie Furay from his Atlantic contract, allowing his new group Poco to sign to Epic, in exchange for Nash being allowed to move to Atlantic. The deal proved highly advantageous to Atlantic - Poco only achieved moderate success for Epic, while Crosby, Stills & Nash's self-titled debut album (released in May 1969) was major hit; it reached #6 on the Billboard album chart, spawned two US Top 40 singles, became a multi-platinum seller and eventually earned a place in the Rolling Stone list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and this led to a new incarnation of the band, which became even more successful.

Their commercial breakthrough prompted the CSN trio to recruit extra members to allow them to tour (since Stephen Stills had played almost all the instruments on their first album). They added session player Dallas Taylor as their permanent drummer and bassist Greg Reeves, finally recruiting Stills' former Buffalo Spingfield bandmate Neil Young. The new lineup reportedly spent several hundred hours in the studio recording their next album, Déjà Vu, which was released in March 1970 and became a huge hit, reaching #1 on the Billboard album chart (also reaching #1 in Australia and #5 in the UK) and generating three hit singles. It was soon followed by the protest single "Ohio" which was rush-released in May 1970 and became a Top 20 hit. All four members released their own albums over the next few months: Stills, Crosby and Nash released their debut solo albums on Atlantic during 1970-71, each featuring stellar supporting casts of backing musicians alongside the other members of CSNY. (Young's After The Goldrush came out on Atlantic's sister label Reprise Records, to which Young had already signed as a solo artist). Stills' album was a major hit, reaching #3 (with the single "Love The One You're With" making #14 on the US singles chart); Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name reached #14 (and has remained in print ever since) and Nash's Songs for Beginners reached #15, with the single "Chicago", reaching #35. In the meantime, Atlantic had released CSNY's second album, the 2LP live set 4 Way Street, which also went to #1 and earned a gold record award, but by the time it had reached the stores the group had already split. Despite this, Atlantic enjoyed continued success with the various members - Stills' next two LPs both made the US Top 10, as did Crosby and Nash's 1972 duo album. The group briefly reformed in 1974 for a hugely successful stadium tour, and although plans for a new album were scuppered by the band's legendary infighting, the hastily-compiled anthology So Far still managed to top the US album chart.

Concurrently, Led Zeppelin were becoming one of the biggest groups in the world, earning millions for Atlantic. Despite some early negative critical reactions, their 1969 debut album took off rapidly, going Top 10 in the US and the UK, where it remained on the charts for 73 weeks and 79 weeks respectively, and it was also a Top 10 album in both Spain and Australia. It has remained a consistently huge seller ever since, earning 8 platinum awards (8 million copies) for sales in the USA alone. Their second LP was even more successful, going to #1 in the USA, Canada, Britain, Australia and Spain and earning a Grammy nomination for Best Album. It too became a massive and enduring success, selling over 12 million copies in the USA.

Alongside the huge success of CSNY and Led Zeppelin, British band Yes established themselves as one of the most significant acts in the burgeoning progressive rock genre, and their success played a significant part in establishing the primacy of the long-playing album as the major sales format for rock music in the 1970s. After several lineup changes during 1969-70, the band settled into its "classic" 1970s incarnation with guitarist Steve Howe and keyboard player Rick Wakeman during 1971. Although the extended length of much of their material made it somewhat difficult to promote the band with single releases, their albums were hugely successful - their third LP The Yes Album (1971), which featured the debut of new guitarist Steve Howe, became their first big hit, reaching #4 in the UK and just scraping onto the chart in the US at #40. From this point, and notwithstanding the impact of the punk/New Wave movement in the late 1970s, the band enjoyed an extraordinary run of success—beginning with Fragile each of the eleven albums they released between 1971 and 1991 (including the lavishly-packaged live triple-album Yessongs) made the Top 20 in both the USA and the UK, and the double-LP Tales of Topographic Oceans (1973) and Going For The One (1977) both reached #1 in the UK.

Atlantic (and the world) suffered an irreparable loss in February 1978 when a fire destroyed most of its tape archive, which had been stored in a non-air-conditioned warehouse in Long Branch, New Jersey. Although (fortunately) the master tapes of the material in Atlantic's released back-catalog survived because they were stored in New York, the fire destroyed or damaged an estimated 5000-6000 reels of tape, including virtually all of the company's unreleased master tapes, alternate takes, rehearsal tapes and session multi-tracks recorded between 1948 and 1969. Atlantic was one of the first labels to record in stereo, and many of the tapes that were lost were stereo 'alternates' recorded in the late 1940s and 1950s (which Atlantic routinely taped simultaneously with the mono versions until the 1960s) as well almost all of the 8-track multitrack masters recorded by Tom Dowd in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Billboard journalist Bill Holland, news of the fire was kept quiet, and one Atlantic staffer who spoke to Holland reported that he did not find out about it until a year later. Fortunately, reissue producers and archivists subsequently located some tapes that were at first presumed 'lost', but which had survived because they had evidently been removed from the New Jersey archive years earlier and not returned. During the compilation of the Rhino-Atlantic John Coltrane boxed set, producer Joel Dorn located supposedly destroyed outtakes from Coltrane's seminal 1959 album Giant Steps, plus other treasures including Bobby Darin's original Atco demo of "Dream Lover" (with Fred Neil playing guitar); Atlantic archivists have since rediscovered other 'lost' material including unreleased masters, alternate takes and rehearsal tapes by Ray Charles, Van "Piano Man" Walls, Ornette Coleman, Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz.

In May 1988, the label held a 40th Anniversary concert, broadcast on HBO. This concert, which was almost 13 hours in length, featured performances by a large number of their artists and included reunions of some rock legends like Led Zeppelin and Crosby, Stills, and Nash (being David Crosby's first full band performance since being released from prison).