HalfNanker Wrote:
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> if Art wood died friday, maybe that was the real
> reason they cancelled AC?


No.."last Friday" would surely mean 3rd November..AC was a week before

gosh this is just horrible news.... absolutely horrible...

Art just died, Ronnie was able to fly to England on Friday and get there to say goodbye (see other post - sympathy for Ronnie.) He was meant to be at his gallery opening in SF last night but got the call to go to England on Friday and Art waited for him to say goodbye and died three hours later.

Tomorrow we will lift him up to the angels over Oakland.

Wow such sadness at asuch a joyous occasion!

Is there any other information about this incident? Ahmet falls just before the Stones take the stage at the Beacon Theatre, which are also being filmed for the Scorcese movie Shine A Light. Did the Stones know about his fall before the show? Maybe a silly question, but I only ask because they seem remarkably in the zone for the movie. You'd think a legend of that stature being decently injured might shake them a bit. Have any of the Stones ever talked about that incident? Or Scorcese? Did anyone blame them at the time?

I was alive then and I remember it happening but just crazy that they then put on a show that night, let alone one that was largely used for filming. I don't know if I've really ever heard anyone talk about that night besides just the news clippings of "this happened, and then Ahmet died about 2 months later." Seems like a big deal.

Correct: nothing other than the obvious was reported.

Very strange indeed.

From "The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun" by Robert Greenfield:

“That night, Ahmet and Mica went to the Beacon Theatre, an aging three-thousand-seat venue on Broadway at 74th Street, to attend a benefit concert by the Rolling Stones for the William J. Clinton Foundation in honor of the former president’s sixtieth birthday. The show was filmed by Martin Scorsese for a documentary entitled Shine a Light, which was dedicated to Ahmet.
Wearing a midnight blue blazer lined with red silk, a thickly knotted white woolen tie, a white-collared blue shirt, gray suspenders, and gray pants, Ahmet entered the crumbling seventy-six-year-old former movie theater through the stage door and was sitting in the very funky downstairs lounge when Jane Rose, Keith Richards’s longtime manager, caught sight of him. As she would later say, “ Ahmet was family. Whenever he showed up, everyone was happy to see him. I was thrilled he was there and I said, ‘You’ve got to say hello to Keith and the guys’ and everyone said, ‘No, he can’t walk.’ But he wanted to see the band so I took him up to the dressing rooms in the elevator.” Rose escorted Ahmet to Richards’s tiny dressing room, where drummer Charlie Watts joined them. The three men began talking and, as Rose recalled, “I was sitting in Ahmet’s lap because the dressing rooms at the Beacon are so small. Ahmet was always Ahmet, grabbing me whenever he saw me or he’d look at my boobs, smile, and go, ‘Hey, Jane.’ That was Ahmet. It was more affectionate and hilarious than any kind of sexual pass.” Rose then began taking photos of Ahmet, Richards, and Watts.
After having fallen while on holiday in Fiji six months earlier, Richards had suffered a subdural hematoma and then undergone surgery to relieve pressure on his brain. When Ahmet asked the guitarist how he was doing, Richards replied, “ Feel the bumps, baby,” and let Ahmet run his hand over the places where six pins had been inserted into his skull. “ He asked me how my head was after the bang. I said, ‘Have a feel.’ Because I have a big dent on the left side, front lobe. He was rubbing it and we were laughing our heads off about it.” Returning to the downstairs lounge, Ahmet was having a drink with Mica and Rupert and Josephine Lowenstein when the wife of the Stones’ former business manager said she was going to the bathroom. In Mica’s words, “ Ahmet said , ‘I’ll go too.’ And I said, ‘I’ll come and help you’ and he said, ‘No.’ The bathroom was two yards from where we were sitting and then Josephine came back and said, ‘Ahmet fell. You had better go there.’ The light wasn’t working in the bathroom and Ahmet pushed the door open with his back to leave and it wasn’t a step, it was just about ten inches of clearance, and with his legs like that, he fell backwards and hit the back of his head.” Alan Dunn , who spent more than thirty-five years working for Mick Jagger and had flown with Ahmet on his private plane when he attended the Atlantic reunion in Las Vegas, recalled, “Ahmet was trying to get out of the bathroom and the door jammed and he pushed on it and he came flying out and the girl who had taken him there tried to catch him but he came out too fast. As he went down on the floor, he flipped over because the cut was on the back of his head and there was a good deal of blood on the floor and he kept saying, ‘Mica, Mica, where are my glasses? I can’t see out of my right eye.’ And she said to him, ‘You haven’t been able to see out of your right eye for the past five years.’”
After an ambulance had been called, Ahmet was put on a stretcher and taken by order of the Stones’ attending physician to New York-Presbyterian. In the words of Shelley Lazar, who was handling VIP tickets for the Stones that night, “Alan Dunn and I were standing there with tears in our eyes. It was quite emotional for me to see this powerhouse of a man totally helpless with a bloody bandage around his head strapped to a stretcher.” “ When I saw them take him out on a stretcher,” Jane Rose said, “I went to a bad place because of what had happened to Keith. I had a really bad feeling about it.” Never losing consciousness, Ahmet continued talking to Mica in the ambulance and then at the hospital.
Because he was still bleeding and needed surgery, Ahmet was taken off blood thinners by his doctors. “ A few hours after the operation was finished,” Mica would later say, “he talked and he was in a good mood and feeling good and then the strokes started because the blood thinners had been preventing the strokes.”
In the words of Jann Wenner, who had also been at the Stones’ show but had no idea Ahmet had fallen backstage, “ The doctors told me he seemed to be okay when he arrived in the hospital. He was still conscious but he had swelling in the brain so they took him off the blood thinners and drained the blood from his head.
After two or three days, he had regained consciousness and seemed to be making a recovery. He was talking and responsive and then he suffered a series of small strokes, possibly because they had taken him off the blood thinners. A series of small blood clots went to his brain and the cumulative effect was a huge stroke. And he never regained consciousness.” Lapsing into a coma, Ahmet became the center of an extraordinary scene that went on for weeks as those who loved him tried to rouse him back to life. In Wenner’s words, “ Mica came night and day, and Nesuhi’s wife and their kids were there, and they waited to see if he would improve and kept monitoring him, but it was pretty clear after the first couple weeks he was not going to improve. They had a boom box in his room playing jazz, and he actually looked calm and very healthy.” “ We tried everything to get him to wake up,” Erith Landeau said. “I was there with him alone one evening and I took his arm and I was so mad he wouldn’t talk, I shook his arm and said, ‘Ahmet! Kid Rock and Pamela are already divorced and you are still not up! Wake up! Wake up!’ I looked at myself and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I was just trying to help. Everyone did. They brought music. They spoke Turkish to him. Nothing worked.” The first time Jann Wenner came to visit Ahmet in the hospital, he broke down and sobbed in Landeau’s arms. In Landeau’s words, “ The way Jann spoke to Ahmet in the hospital was unbelievable. ‘You are bigger than life. You can’t do this. You can’t leave. I need you. We need you. There is so much more to be done.’ It was really wonderful.” On November 15, Jane Rose sent the photos she had taken of Ahmet, Keith Richards, and Charlie Watts backstage at the Beacon to him along with a note wishing him a speedy recovery. On the back of one photo was a handwritten note that read, “ Dear Ahmet , Get well. I’ll see you soon. C.R. Watts, drummer, the Rolling Stones.” Believing the sequence of events backstage at the Beacon that night had been “ ghostly ,” Keith Richards had written, “ Ahmet, never touch my head again. One love, Keith.” On the day before Thanksgiving, Frances Chantly went to see her “ beloved boss ” and “ was alone with him and I began talking to him and really pouring my heart out to him. I played some jazz music for him and said if he could hear me, he should move his eyebrows. His eyebrows were twitching like crazy and I knew he understood what I was saying and he could hear me. That was like my goodbye to him and when I saw him again, he was unconscious and there were no signs of life. For a long time, I blamed the Rolling Stones even though I knew it was not their fault.” Six weeks after the accident, Ahmet’s family and his doctors reached what Wenner would later call “ a kind of a unanimous decision they should not prolong it further. They didn’t exactly stop life support but they let him die. He had left a living will and after six weeks, his wishes were finally honored and he died peacefully with Mica and his family there.”

Available at Amazon.com

Thank you, this story was completely new to me.

But since Ahmed never lost consciousness and was 'in a good mood' according to witnesses when he left for the hospital, I can imagine that the Stones weren't that shocked and therefore it didn't really affect the show..

Yes, thank you RobberPride for providing that detailed description what happened. Didn't know the details either.

A tragic accident due to unfortunate circumstances. It even probably had not been that fatal if Ahmet hadn't had already physical problems. As I understand it it was the strokes that caused the terrible outcome due to taking his blood thinners off.

It must've been shocking to Keith and Charlie, being so close to it, but probably as he seemed to do just fine it didn't affect into their performances that night.

- Doxa



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2023-03-10 13:28 by Doxa.