Here Comes the Night (13 page)

With two records on the charts, the boys decided to cool their heels in New York. They moved out of the Algonquin into an apartment on Seventy-First Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. They briefly took a job as heads of East Coast r&b a&r for RCA Victor but quit after Leiber couldn’t tell his office cubicle from the others coming back from lunch. They whipped up some songs for Atlantic artists—“Fools Fall in Love” for the Drifters, “Lucky Lips” for Ruth Brown—caught some plays, had drinks, dinners, and more drinks with the Erteguns and Wexler. After a couple of months, Leiber split for Hollywood and Stoller remained behind.

After “Hound Dog,” Jean Aberbach of Hill & Range, the Elvis Presley music publishers, had wanted more songs, and Leiber had the nutty idea to send over “Love Me,” a corny country music takeoff they originally did for the Spark label with a duo from Oakland called Willie and Ruth. Presley, who apparently went through life entirely without any sense of irony, loved the dopey song, sang it straight, and made it
one of the most popular records of 1956. Aberbach bought an interest in Leiber and Stoller’s publishing company, making Hill & Range their partners.

Stoller returned to Los Angeles in early 1957 and he and Leiber started working on the next Coasters record. The song “Young Blood” had been born earlier in New York when Wexler challenged Leiber to write lyrics for a title dreamed up by songwriter Doc Pomus, a burly bear of a blues singer on crutches, owing to a childhood bout of polio. Leiber finished the song in the car on the way to dinner at Wexler’s house in Great Neck. They were listening to playbacks at Atlantic’s new Fifty-Seventh Street offices the next day and Leiber recited the lyrics to Stoller, who went to the piano and put them to music on the spot.

Back together on the West Coast, they made four songs with the Coasters in February 1957 at Hollywood Recorders and were surprised to see the “Young Blood” A-side eclipsed a couple of weeks after its May release by the flip, “Searchin,’” a song riddled with references to the radio detective shows of Leiber’s youth—
Charlie Chan, Sergeant Friday, Boston Blackie
. The record, which showcased the increasingly formidable artistic command of the songwriting/record production team, became Atlantic’s first million-seller.

Before Leiber and Stoller, the Atlantic chiefs had to rely on intermediaries such as Jesse Stone for the creation of the music. They dabbled in songwriting but almost always in collaboration with another more musically skilled coauthor. Wexler had a lot of song credits but never wrote a song by himself in his life. The music of Leiber and Stoller was their vision from beginning to end. Leiber demonstrated the vocals to the performers, showed them the exact timing and intonations he wanted. Stoller played the piano and together they rehearsed the group until the Coasters became their voices. Sometimes Leiber even sang with the group on the sessions. The Coasters, skillful performers, were just the singers; Leiber and Stoller were the artists. They didn’t write songs—they wrote records.

Jean Aberbach then summoned the pair to New York to cook up numbers for the new Presley movie,
Jailhouse Rock
. They caught Miles at the Village Vanguard, Basie at Birdland, Monk at the Five Spot. They checked out some museums. They saw a couple of Broadway shows. Eventually Aberbach showed up at their room in the Gorham Hotel and planted himself on their couch until the boys got off the dime. They finished off four songs in that one afternoon (the last one they wrote, “I Want to Be Free,” may have had some unspoken subtext). A month later, back in Los Angeles, they dined with Colonel Parker, Presley’s controlling manager, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, having him check them out before meeting Presley later that week at the recording session at Radio Recorders, where Big Mama Thornton had recorded “Hound Dog.”

Presley surprised Leiber and Stoller with his knowledge of r&b records in general and their work in specific (he knew their early, pre-Atlantic Ray Charles cover, “The Snow Is Falling”). They cut Leiber and Stoller’s title track to the film, Presley’s bassist and drummer swiping the intro from a swing version they remembered of “The Anvil Chorus.” The next day, they returned to work out proper arrangements for their songs “Treat Me Nice” and “I Want to Be Free.” Stoller took over the piano bench for the second song, and after they were done with that, with Leiber virtually running the session from the studio floor, they decided to throw in “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care,” leftover from the New York writing session.

Leiber and Stoller returned to Presley recording sessions in September at Radio Recorders, where Elvis was finishing a Christmas album. At the studio, Jerry and Mike knocked off a blues riff about Christmas
(Santa Claus is coming down your chimney tonight)
that Presley loved and instantly recorded, along with all the old Bing Crosby crap they were making him sing that afternoon. They also slipped in the plaintive ballad “Don’t” that they wrote specifically at Elvis’s request and had already sent along some months earlier. When
Colonel Parker got hold of Jean Aberbach and finished chewing him out about songwriters taking material directly to Elvis, bypassing the music publishers and management, Leiber and Stoller never set foot in the studio again with Elvis.

They took the Coasters to Chicago and recorded in the Chess Records studios in July 1957 with bassist Willie Dixon and the other Chess sidemen, but neither “Idol with the Golden Head” nor “What Is the Secret of Your Success” were destined for charts success despite the sophistication of the material and the confidence of the performance and production. A December session in New York yielded an indifferent pair of masters, and before the end of their first million-selling year, the Coasters had slipped off the charts entirely.

Atlantic Records wasn’t doing much better. Sales had slowed from a fairly good year in 1956, when the label lofted hits by Big Joe Turner (“Corrine Corrina”), Ray Charles (“Lonely Avenue”), and newly signed artists Ivory Joe Hunter (“Since I Met You Baby”) and Chuck Willis (“It’s Too Late”), both r&b veterans other labels let slide. Clyde McPhatter, back from the army, scored with “Treasure of Love.” LaVern Baker’s “Jim Dandy” did pretty well, after Wexler kept it in the can for almost a year. But the label went cold the next year.

The one light in the leaden release schedule was “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes, a group of teenaged girls from Harlem’s P.S. 109 who charmed Ahmet with a mean-spirited little song about a teacher they especially despised. Ahmet had them clean up the lyrics, and the girls’ youthful exuberance carried the record into the Top Ten in July 1957. “I’m going to
shul
for y’all,” their Atlanta distributor said. Wexler was very amused at Jews speaking in Southern accents, but he was beginning to wonder how long this could last.

Two records recorded and released within weeks of each other in spring 1958 reversed Atlantic’s failing fortunes. Leiber and Stoller banged out the song “Yakety Yak” in about fifteen minutes one afternoon at Leiber’s Washington Square duplex. Stoller sat down at the
piano and started playing what he thought was a Coasters-like rhythm. Leiber, in the kitchen boiling water for tea, shouted out, “Take out the papers and the trash.” Stoller shouted back, “Or you don’t get no spending cash.” They had never worked in Atlantic’s new studios before (the record company offices had been moved and Tom Dowd converted the fifth floor on Fifty-Sixth Street to full-time recording). Leiber wanted to back his bet on “Yakety Yak” with a Coasterized version of “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart.” Two other songs were also recorded at the session—“Three Cool Cats” and “Stewball”—but Leiber need not have worried. “Yakety Yak” exploded when it was released in June 1958, racing to number one on the Pop and R&B charts. Three weeks later, the second record, “Splish Splash” hit the charts.

Wexler signed Bobby Darin to Atco after he bought a handful of demos the Bronx-born singer, fresh from a hitless stint as a Decca Records artist, recorded by himself in Nashville. Wexler picked up the recordings as masters and assigned him to Atco and Herb Abramson. The rock-and-rolled “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (In a Five and Ten Cent Store),” the old Billy Rose warhorse, did a little something, but not much. Two subsequent singles did less and Abramson told Ahmet he was going to drop Darin from the label. Ahmet had grown fond of the kid, who used to play piano in the Atlantic waiting room, wailing away on Ray Charles numbers. Ahmet had a feeling for him. He booked Darin into half of a session he planned the next week for jazz vocalist Morgana King.

They cut three songs in their half of the three-hour session—“Queen of the Hop,” “Judy Don’t Be Moody,” and “Splish Splash.” Darin dashed off the song “Splish Splash” at the apartment of disc jockey Murray “The K” Kaufman, whose mother fancied herself a songwriter and came up with the title. She got half the copyright. It never hurt to have a famous disc jockey (or his mother) holding a financial interest in a song. The arrangements were done in the studio and the two Morgana King numbers cut in the split session were never even
released. “Splish Splash” took off and streaked up the charts behind “Yakety Yak.”

This April 10, 1958, session was also the first time engineer Tom Dowd used his new eight-track recorder. He ordered the equipment nine months earlier, one of the first production models to come from Ampex, and put it to work as soon as he unpacked the crates and wired it up, making Atlantic Records the first company to routinely record in stereo.

Afraid the label was going to drop him as Abramson threatened, Darin had gone into the studio and cut another one of his songs, “Early in the Morning.” Murray “The K” Kaufman sold the master to Brunswick Records, who released the record under the name the Ding Dongs. Atlantic’s lawyers quickly took the record back from Brunswick and Ahmet released it by the Rinky Dinks. Brunswick countered by having the song covered by one of their artists, Buddy Holly, and the two versions battled it out on the charts (the Rinky Dinks record topped out at twenty-four and Buddy Holly’s finished at thirty-two). Ahmet forgave Darin; he was suddenly the label’s best-selling artist. Abramson, however, was through. The remaining partners scraped together $300,000 and bought him out of the company he started. His ex-wife never spoke to him again.

With Leiber and Stoller turning out these exceptional Coasters records, Ahmet and Wexler handed over the Drifters, an almost bankrupt enterprise, to Leiber and Stoller. The group was managed by former trumpet player George Treadwell, husband and manager of Sarah Vaughan, and somewhere along the line, he copyrighted the name and so, in effect, owned the group. Members were paid a small salary and did not share in either record royalties or performance fees. As a result, there was always an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in the group and members came and went with some frequency. When Leiber and Stoller took a transitory lineup into the studio with lead tenor Bobby Hendricks on his only session with the group and cut their song “Drip
Drop” in April 1958, it had been more than a year since the group had been in the studio.

Treadwell had a contract with the Apollo Theater for two performances a year by a group called the Drifters. Wexler also saw juice in that tomato. Treadwell fired the entire existing set of Drifters and hired another vocal group called the Five Crowns to be the new Drifters. The Crowns had been around the scene even longer than the original Drifters, with various members, under various names. Their latest record was on some nothing label called R&B Records distributed by Atlantic. The twenty-year-old lead vocalist Benny Nelson—now calling himself Ben E. King—had the bones of a song that Leiber thought might do the trick. During rehearsal, Stoller started playing a fancy little countermelody and Leiber got the idea to use strings.

They ended up with twenty-six pieces on the date, far too many for the Atlantic studios. The sessions moved to a studio called Coastal on Forty-Second Street, which was built in a ditch. The booth was in the third balcony and the studio was in the orchestra—deep, narrow, high. Sound bounced all over the place and nobody could see each other. They rented some tympani that quickly went out of tune. Arranger Stan Applebaum copped a string line from Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture
. Leiber’s recent enthusiasm for Brazilian music, inspired by the recordings of Italian actress Silvana Mangano, led them to experiment with the slow samba rhythm called
baion
. Vocalist Charles Thomas, who was supposed to do the lead vocals and did sing the other two songs recorded that day, choked, and baritone Ben E. King stepped up, even though he was supposed to sing the bass part. The other Drifters were floating off in some key all their own. It should have been a fiasco, but there was something about the record that sounded intriguing. Stoller thought it sounded like two different radio stations tuned to the same frequency. They took it to play for Wexler, who was eating a tuna fish sandwich at his desk. He sprayed tuna all over. “That’s the worst piece of shit I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said.

“There Goes My Baby” not only hit the top of both Pop and R&B charts, sold more than a million copies, and started a second act for the Drifters that would prove even greater than the first act, but also opened up the whole idea of symphonic r&b. Leiber and Stoller had taken rhythm and blues into a new realm. While most of the record men in the r&b field held the music in veiled contempt, Leiber and Stoller loved the music they made. They shared that with Ahmet and Jerry. These were passionate men pursuing their own destiny, borrowing from everything, making it up as they went along, loving what they were doing.

Leiber and Stoller stumbled slightly on the “Yakety Yak” follow-up—another radio drama story song from Leiber’s childhood, “The Shadow Knows,” that didn’t click—but they were back on track with consecutive Top Tens in 1959 with “Charlie Brown,” “Along Came Jones” and “Poison Ivy,” each one a gem, little masterpieces of comic timing. LaVern Baker scored with “I Cried a Tear” in late 1958, but mainly, the established Atlantic acts—Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, the Clovers, Ivory Joe Hunter—were done. The label lost Clyde McPhatter in a bidding war that MGM won for $50,000. But Leiber and Stoller had brought the Drifters back from the dead, Bobby Darin was the label’s first teen star, and Ray Charles finally produced the breakthrough record Atlantic always knew was in him.