B009HOTHPE EBOK (20 page)

I started telling everybody I knew about this great group over there called The Beatles and how I felt they were going to cause a major change in the music business. And change the business they did. And here I was, promoting these guys that almost put me out of the business!

I’d come back and talk to Norman Weiss (my agent who later became my manger) and Sid Bernstein, one of the other agents that worked at GAC, and say, “You gotta listen to this!” And eventually it seeped in. That’s how they eventually wound up on a little label: Vee-Jay Records out of Chicago.

Finally Norman listened to me, went over there, met with Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, and brought The Beatles back and put them on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in ’64.

Oh, they were slow on the uptake—everything traveled at a snail’s pace back then. They didn’t get it. “Love Me Do” probably sounded very primitive to them. It was so new sounding that they couldn’t wrap their ears around it. The business in those days was very basic. It was more like one guy phoning the next guy about an act, and if they got a bite, they’d
mail
you a picture. There were no fax machines, everything was slower, more cautious, you couldn’t maneuver the world then the way you can today.

It took time for people to really grasp what you were talking about. You didn’t just jump on a plane (or online) and go “Look! Something amazing’s happening over here.” It cost money and there wasn’t a lot of that around. Guys weren’t flying to Great Britain at the drop of a hat. Still, things were about to change. Everybody had been so confident that we were it, but, as it turned out, we weren’t.

Changes were happening in the music business in part because of changes in technology, the advent of the stereo sound system, FM radio, three- and four-track tape machines, the electric guitar, transistors—all developments that made rock ’n’ roll possible.

I remember in 1958 when Boeing and Douglas introduced their commercial jetliners, the 707 and the DC-8. I was very green when I first began traveling, and when they first took me to the airport to get on a jet I was scared shitless. I didn’t know what a jet plane was. No, I’m not getting on
that
! I want a plane with those things that go round and round! What do you mean
jet
plane? What are you, crazy? I looked at the engine: You mean air goes in there?

The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, all those guys, were electronically driven, particularly in terms of guitars, making a personal statement through the way they played their instruments. I could never have used my piano the way a guitar player could use his guitar. Unless you’re a flamboyant showman like Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, you’re not going to set fire to the keyboard or play it behind your back.

What The Beatles were laying down was a road map of vibe and attitude with guitars. The Everlys’ harmonies were a huge influence on The Beatles and The Hollies, as they were on Simon and Garfunkel. I always felt that although I had supposedly “made it,” I was quite a different entity than this bunch and always had to keep my eye on the ball. I needed to think of novel strategies just to stay ahead of the curve.

When I think of the difference between the way the fans saw me and the way they saw Buddy Holly, I feel it was because his approach was so personal and “in house,” if you will. He played the guitar and The Crickets were his band, not like the kind of pickup bands I was using on the road. It was his bass player and his drummer playing both on record and on stage. My approach was to envision a big orchestra and creating an enveloping atmosphere around it. The Brit Invasion bands wouldn’t have been intimidated by that kind of sound; it wasn’t the kind of thing a Brit garage band could attempt, anyway—or even
wanted
to. They may have been in awe of the Don Costa arrangements but that was irrelevant to them because they could never orchestrate a song like that—and had no wish to. Theirs was strictly a customized sound. Like me, Chuck Berry had pickup bands but it was always him on guitar. The guitar became the predominant means of getting a song across and the concept of the group created a sense of camaraderie with their audiences.

Buddy laid down a vibe that was unique to him. No technology. One microphone for him, one in front of the band. Nothing like today.

The British were taken with the concept of the group, of three or four instruments—a riff-driven, wailing guitar assault. That’s where I separated from the pack, because I wasn’t ever going to be that guy in any shape or form. I wasn’t a guitar player and I wasn’t in a group. I wasn’t going to be initiating any next wave.

Is there life after The Beatles? I felt a great frustration, as did other performers. Americans as a whole hadn’t really embraced pop music in the ’50s. The media as we know it was virtually nonexistent; fashion hadn’t kicked in with the sound. Elvis was being shown from the waist up. No one really believed pop music would become such a big part of the culture. It was just a fad. Then came the British Invasion, and that turned it around. Suddenly, rock became part of the fashion industry. It keyed into advertising, lifestyle, everything. There was a whole fashion change going on, and I was getting with it, wearing bell-bottom trousers. The whole rock scene as I knew it had changed and I needed to get a new wardrobe.

The Beatles dominated everything right from the beginning. Hit after hit after hit. It was at that point that American artists just started to get wiped out. Something new and strange was happening—it was like a sonic comet had hit the earth and evaporated a huge segment of the American musical industry.

It didn’t really bust out until The Beatles. Until then, the pop music business just wasn’t accepted by the mainstream, and Madison Avenue hadn’t embraced it. We were just looked upon as a novelty. Once it
was
accepted by Madison Avenue, pop music instantly became part of the culture. Once The Beatles hit, the media was all over us, whereas prior to that they wouldn’t even
look
at us. All you ever heard was, “Oh, it’ll never last” and “Burn those records” and “Elvis Presley is disgusting and vulgar.”

So, after I recovered from the initial shock, I loved what The Beatles had wrought. As a businessman, I looked at it and said, “Okay, I’m off the radio now, because all you hear is British Invasion music, but I’ve had a good five-year run and now I have to figure out a new direction. On the other hand, the Brit Invasion had now gotten the whole world listening to music. I figured there’s gotta be a place for me in there somewhere. I said, “Wow, there’s a bigger window, greater things can happen, and everybody’s got their time. I’m still writing and I’m still touring Europe and I’m even selling records in Italy.” So I embraced it. No choice, anyway. That’s where the hook-up with RCA records really worked for me. RCA had studios, and distribution in Europe and around the world. You get a much better quality record commercially if it’s produced and manufactured in the country where it’s going to be sold and played on the radio. The arrangers in these different countries all have different conceptions of how a record should sound in the area it’s intended for.

How I made the transition from my moment of fame in the fifties to my new situation in the mid-sixties was that I knew a tidal wave was coming. The Beatles began having hits in England in October 1962 on their English label, EMI. By 1963, they were huge in England, but EMI’s USA subsidiary, Capitol Records, at first refused to distribute their singles, delaying The Beatles’ success here by over a year. Their first American releases came out on the small American labels, Vee-Jay and Swan Records, but by December 1963 the demand for Beatles records had become so huge that Capitol began releasing their singles. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” came out on December 26 of 1963 and by January 10th, of the following year it had sold over a million copies. When they arrived at Idlewild Airport (subsequently renamed JFK) on February 7, Beatlemania had begun.

Most of my contemporaries couldn’t compete with the new sound. There’s only so much space on the radio. I was fortunate in that I continued to have songs on the charts for the next couple of years.

The group sound that came with the British Invasion was so prominent that nine out of ten records on the charts were by bands, and most were guitar driven. Something I dearly loved—having a streak of hits—had stopped happening. All of a sudden it wasn’t working and I had some heavy thinking to do. I was still performing, but I was living on my past, and the past was receding down the railway lines. The Beatles had derailed us.

It was an especially bitter pill for me to swallow because I’d always been the youngest on the bus, the youngest in Vegas, the youngest this, the youngest that. I’d always been the kid. There was no precedent for what I was doing in terms of the industry. The R&B musicians (Little Richard, Chuck Berry) and the country rockers (Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis) and even the guitar slinging Southern boys all come out of a tradition. I came out of nowhere, out of my own tormented teen head. It had always been uphill. I was always having to prove myself, always had to be better than anyone else, because the public weren’t that accepting of young kids who sang teen heartbreak songs. They’d never heard one before me—and hoped they’d never have to again!

And then, after all you think you’ve achieved, you suddenly realize you’re being left behind, the Cadillac you’re driving is last year’s model. You can be hot as hell and everything comes to you clean as a whistle, and then you cool off and your career goes into a long winter’s nap that you pray to wake up from. Knowing the inevitability of change, you need to be ahead of it. I’ve always tried to anticipate what’s coming next, and that’s when I began to realize: Okay, this thing of mine could end, and will, so what do I need to build that’s going to help me last where others in my crowd didn’t?

*   *   *

Bobby Darin’s dilemma was similar to my own but he dealt with it very differently. Basically his predicament was typical of the problems American pop singers had to deal with in the face of the British Invasion. In many ways he was a classic casualty of that shift as well as the impact of Bob Dylan and hard rock. He was a great artist, one of the most talented from that whole ’50s, early ’60s group of singers. So it’s pretty painful when you’ve seen people like Darin hugely successful all of a sudden get shut down and are no longer working. Doubt is debilitating for a performer, and once it enters your life, it’s hard to recover from it. Once the media abandoned certain performers, they lost their nerve. And once that spirit disappears in your mind, you’re gone. I saw that so many times with friends. You don’t know what to say.

When the changes happened, Darin tried to get on the new bandwagon but it just didn’t take. He went totally into left field: he wore jeans, he played guitar, he took off his toupee, he did Dylan songs, which I didn’t think he could pull off. You have to stay within the context of your musical personality, but Bobby changed his whole image drastically. And more than once. He tried to fit in, and ultimately it destroyed him—his career never recovered, never mind what it did to his health.

I said, “Bobby, you can’t change everything about yourself every five years. You’re Bobby Darin; they’ll get over it, like they did with Presley.”

He did manage to pull it off a couple of times, with “Simple Song of Freedom” and those things. He got more politically aware, hung around with Bobby Kennedy—but overall, I think he lost his way, lost his identity. When you forget who you are, when you change too much, you end up losing yourself in the shuffle.

When the British Invasion came along I remember Darin saying, “I don’t know how we’re going to survive this.” I was never tempted to adapt to all the hard rock or guitar-driven stuff. I couldn’t, anyway, and I didn’t think anyone would buy me doing that. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do or even if I wanted to stay in the business. I didn’t want to succumb to that. I had a lot of discussions with Darin about it. He was sincere about his attempts to adapt, and at least managed to pull it off to the extent that it didn’t become a joke.

He was the most talented of the Sinatra wannabes, he certainly got Frank’s attention. He had that kind of chutzpah and arrogance that kept him going on for a long time. He truly was a force of nature in pop music, along with Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley—those were the guys who would have ongoing careers, whatever happened.

Bobby Darin got very, very ill, at the end. One of his last shows was
The Midnight Special,
which he promised to come on and do with me. He should never have been there, because he was not well at all. I was very indebted to him because I knew he was not in good shape. We all knew it was just a matter of time. I went to see him shortly before he died, went out on his boat with him. He was always very fatalistic. He used to say, “I’m not going to live long.” Toward the end of his life, he changed, became more mellow, humbler, more sensitive, and open.

*   *   *

I realized early on in my career, watching people come and go, that it was a very dangerous business to be in because the turnover was so rapid. One solution was to focus on writing, whether it was for movies, TV theme music, or writing songs for other singers.

I looked at it in terms of economics. I’d spent all of these years establishing myself, and by the early sixties I was making more money without hit records than I’d had with them, so on some level I was happy. I’d written the theme for
The Longest Day,
I’d come up with musical overture for the
Tonight Show
theme, so as a human being, as an artist, I was being rewarded, and even fulfilled. I had a strong foundation … but how to build on it?

By happenstance—and Irv’s foresight—I’d had four years to prepare. I was the opening show for four weeks at the Empire Room in the Waldorf Astoria. Things were doing well on the global front, too. I put out my second Italian LP that year,
A Casa Nostra.
My record, “Ogni Volta” was number one in Italy, selling over a million copies soon after release. I sang it at the San Remo Festival that summer and it ultimately sold four million copies in Italy.