Here Comes the Night (15 page)

Berns started making the scene, meeting people, getting known, developing contacts. When Dante and the Evergreens showed up from Los Angeles to sing their hit “Alley Oop” at the Brooklyn Paramount, Berns introduced himself in a hotel lobby to lead vocalist Don (Dante) Drowty, handing him a business card and identifying himself as a music publisher.

Drowty and his three associates were Santa Monica College students whose record exploded on a small label. The song had been recorded by a number of groups, but Dante and the Evergreens and the Hollywood Argyles, a group whose members had gone to the same high school as the Evergreens, were battling for supremacy pretty much market by market. In New York, Dante and the Evergreens went to number one in three weeks after the June 1960 release. The group came to town to play the Apollo Theater—after Buddy Holly and the Crickets and Duane Eddy, only the third white group to play there—and James Brown was on the bill. Harlem is a long way from Santa Monica. Berns went with them.

Berns took Drowty the next day to the Mellin office and, before Drowty and company went back to California, he and Berns were writing songs and singing together into Drowty’s portable Wollensak wire recorder in Berns’s room at the Hotel Woodward at Fifty-Sixth Street and Broadway, where Berns lived with a pair of Siamese cats and a litterbox. He was scuffling, trying to make things happen. He often ate cheap at the automat and sometimes he shared of a can of tuna with the cats for dinner.

Bobby Mellin also managed a vocalist named Hoagy Lands, who had worked as a solo in clubs around Jersey after his high school vocal group, the Dynaflows, flowed apart. Lands didn’t know whom she was talking about when Mellin’s secretary called to say “Bert Berns wants
to see you.” With Mellin in England, Lands was informed, Berns was a songwriter who was going to work with him. They rehearsed two songs Berns wrote with Phil Medley. The session was produced by Morty Palitz, an old-time record man who ran Columbia Records during the forties, and the arranger was Teacho Wiltshire, a tall, light-skinned black pianist who had been around the scene for years, arranging and even producing a few jazz sessions for Prestige and others with the likes of Thelonious Monk and Annie Ross (“Twisted”).

Lands, whose father was Cuban and mother part Cherokee, sounded a lot like Sam Cooke without the smooth sheen. For the rest of his life, Berns would work with Hoagy Lands. “Lighted Windows,” the B-side, was another take on the old mistaken-identity gag Bob Crewe and Frank Slay worked with such success on the Rays’ “Silhouettes,” but “(I’m Gonna) Cry Some Tears” gave Lands what he needed to rip it up. Berns would spend his life putting his singers in tears—tears of joy, tears of shame, tears of rage, tears of despair—this was just the first time. But when Lands hit that chorus—“I’m gonna cry-y-y-y-y, yeah”—it was pure pay dirt.

Mellin paid to have some singles pressed on a label named Judi, after his daughter. The record attracted enough attention, and they sold the master to ABC-Paramount, after which it was never heard of again. But, in Hoagy Lands, Bert Berns had found a voice that could bring his songs to the edge of heartbreak.

Things were starting to happen and Berns was beginning to get songs recorded. Frankie Brent, ex–Freddie Bell and the Bellboys gone solo, cut his manic “Bangin’ on the Bongo.” Some sappy white singer on Laurie named Tom Gullion did “Precious” (Berns lifted the melody from the Jewish hymn “Ein Keloheinu”) and “Turn Around,” both terrible songs, but Berns was getting around.

When Berns went to visit Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, he pulled out the Goya nylon-string. The first thing he played Wexler in that first meeting was a little dance song with an Afro-Cuban wrinkle that he had written with Phil Medley called “Twist and Shout.”

Berns based the number on his favorite song, “La Bamba.” In fact, he started writing the song one morning in his office at Mellin Music with Ray Passman, sitting behind his desk, strumming the chords to “La Bamba,” and humming, while Passman beat a tattoo on Berns’s desktop with his fingertips. They had only just gotten a good groove going when Berns’s secretary interrupted, reminding Berns about a lunch appointment. Berns told Passman to come back after lunch and they would finish the song. When Berns returned from lunch and didn’t find Passman, he went down the hall and found Phil Medley. They wrote the song, using large hunks of an unrecorded song they published the previous year as “Shake It Up Baby.”

Berns had made an impression on Jerry Wexler. He used a song Berns and Ersel Hickey wrote, “A Little Bird Told Me So,” on a LaVern Baker session. Wexler also decided to take “Twist and Shout” for a new r&b duo on Atlantic called the Top Notes. Derek Martin and Howard Guyton, who were going by Derek Ray and Guy Howard, had been singing together in groups since the Five Pearls recorded for Aladdin in 1954. As the Top Notes, they had released a couple of singles that went nowhere the previous year on Atlantic and were due to cut a couple more at this February 23, 1961, session at Atlantic Studios.

Sitting in the producer’s chair next to Wexler that afternoon was a nineteen-year-old boy wonder from the West Coast named Phil Spector, who hit the Midtown music scene like an atom bomb since he showed up the previous May 1960. Spector, who had written and sung a 1958 number one hit when he was still in high school based on his father’s epitaph, “To Know Him Is to Love Him” by the Teddy Bears, told his mother he was going to New York to work as an interpreter at the United Nations. Actually, he spent his first few nights in town sleeping on a couch in Leiber and Stoller’s office, after their esteemed benefactor Lester Sill sent him their way. They didn’t like the little squirrel but were impressed with Spector’s musical skill and signed him to a publishing deal.

Spector had written a couple of songs with Doc Pomus and managed to promote himself into a writing session with Jerry Leiber that produced the song “Spanish Harlem” (although the uncredited Stoller added the descending triplets that stitch the whole song together the first time Spector and Leiber played it for Ertegun and Wexler). In October 1960, Spector attended the Leiber-Stoller session at Bell Sound on West Fifty-Fourth Street just off Broadway, where Ben E. King, making his first solo recording session since leaving the Drifters, cut two of the songs he wrote with Doc Pomus, “First Taste of Love” and “Young Boy Blues,” along with “Spanish Harlem.” With only about fifteen minutes remaining in the session, Leiber and Stoller pulled out a song based on an old hymn that Ben E. King had brought to their office several days earlier for them to polish, called “Stand By Me.”
*
The session ran a half hour overtime and Wexler was furious.

Only a couple of weeks before the Ben E. King date, Spector had produced his first New York session. Leiber made it happen. Johnny Bienstock ran Hill & Range’s record label, Big Top Records, for his cousins the Aberbachs. The Aberbachs had been convinced to start the label to compensate for the decline in revenues from sheet music sales, but there was a built-in conflict. The Aberbachs always viewed the record label as music publishers and Johnny Bienstock knew that successful record men looked at things differently. He wanted Leiber and Stoller to cut a record with singer Ray Peterson, coming off the Top Ten hit “Tell Laura I Love Her.” Leiber, who couldn’t be bothered, handed off the job to an eager Spector, whose production of Peterson doing “Corinne, Corinna” also made the Top Ten.

Cocky, contentious, obnoxious, Spector caught the attention of Ahmet Ertegun, who brought him around Atlantic, eventually offering him a job as staff producer. By the time Berns saw him sitting there
between Wexler and Dowd, Spector had done only a couple of sessions for Atlantic with vocalist Billy Storm—a Wagnerian cover of the Turbans’ “When You Dance”—and a singer named Jean DuShon, but nothing anybody noticed. He was really almost as much a nobody as Berns, but he was getting the shot.

In the studio with “Twist and Shout,” Spector took charge. He changed the tempo of the song, rewrote the middle section, and lost all the Afro-Cuban rhythms. Wexler urged him on. They turned a surefire natural hit into a bland, banal shuffle. Berns watched from a gallery. He was horrified. “You fucked it up,” he told Wexler.

“Shut the fuck up,” Wexler said.

THE RECORD WAS
dead before it left the studio and scarcely noticed when it was released, but Berns had learned an important lesson. He hadn’t been in the record business long before he came to understand that the producer held all the power. He was the commander of the session, the architect of the record, the final arbiter on all matters creative. The fate of the song was in the producer’s hands. If only out of self-defense, Berns needed to take control of his songs’ full creative lives.

The whole idea of record producers was new. Some old-time artists and repertoire guys might have done little more than bring the beer, but there was no doubting the kind of influence a cunning, expert a&r man could have on a record. Milt Gabler at Decca Records, who made all those jump-and-jive Louis Jordan records in the forties, clearly steered the yodeling hick cowboy Bill Haley down that road on early rock and roll hits such as “Rock Around the Clock,” “See You Later Alligator,” or Haley’s barn-burning 1956 Little Richard cover, “Rip It Up.” The man who probably invented record production, Mitch Miller, the grand and elegant head of a&r at Columbia, earned a lifetime of bad publicity from his fevered denunciation of rock and roll, but the controversy obscured his genuine contributions.

At the 1958 disc jockey convention in Kansas City, Miller famously accused the assembled radio programming executives of having abdicated their responsibilities “to the eight-to-fourteen-year-olds, the pre-shave crowd that makes up twelve percent of the country’s population and zero percent of its buying power once you eliminate the ponytail ribbons, Popsicles, and peanut brittle.”

His real crime was to suit deed to word and keep Columbia almost entirely out of rock and roll and rhythm and blues. As a result, companies a fraction of the size of the industry leader were beating out Columbia’s brains on the hit parade.

But Miller was an authentic visionary of the recording studio. By adding sound effects to his forties hits with Frankie Laine, Miller instinctively understood the science of recording to be something more than making mere replicas of live performances of music, and unwittingly paved the way for rock and roll (his fifties hits with Johnnie Ray have been described as the missing link between Sinatra and Presley). Miller’s experiments were more than rambunctious inventions; they were purposeful recording industry strategy. Not only were his double-tracked vocals on Patti Page records a technical breakthrough, but also the records established Page as the country’s leading female pop vocalist.

By the time he went to work at Columbia Records in 1950, with the label’s top-drawer artist roster, Miller had developed a robust, charismatic approach to record production that boldly asserted the art of phonography—the art of making phonograph records—into the second half of the twentieth century. He knew that phonograph records were an entirely different entertainment experience than listening to live music and that the modern recording studio expanded the number of tools and resources available to the contemporary composer. Miller was a classically trained oboist and composer and a bit of a snob, but no useless square. He loved to smoke weed and hang out with jazzmen. He played oboe next to Bird’s alto on the classic
Charlie Parker with Strings
sessions—almost a duet at times—and was standing next to Bird on the album jacket photo.

The record producer was somewhat analogous to a motion picture director. The work is, by nature, collaborative, but the record producer, like a film director, was signatory of the piece, the one who signed off on all the creative decisions. More than the performer, the songwriter, the arranger, the musicians who provide the accompaniment, the record belongs to the producer. He is the responsible party.

Producers began to sign the records. George Goldner ran a somewhat imperial credit on singles he produced for his End and Gone labels: “Under the Personal Supervision of George Goldner.” Leiber and Stoller may have been the first independent producers in the business, but Atlantic didn’t start giving them label credit until “Save the Last Dance for Me” by the Drifters in 1960.

The growing recognition of the role of the producer was one of the signs that the record business was moving beyond the seat-of-the-pants approach of the independents only a few years earlier. Just as the promotion methods and distribution operations had rapidly expanded to meet the market, the ways these men made records in the studio were changing in fundamental and profound ways. Berns understood the record producer was the man in charge and he wanted to be that man. He started to produce sessions where he could. That was the lesson of “Twist and Shout.”

He conducted a split session at Bell Sound for Johnny Bienstock and Big Top Records with gospel-voiced Dottie Clark and Sammy Turner, a greatly underrated vocalist three releases past his 1959 Top Ten moment, “Lavender Blue,” a sappy song originally sung by Burl Ives in a Disney movie, retooled for Turner on Big Top by producers Leiber and Stoller. Turner gave Berns’s “Pour It On” an earnest affability, but the record wasn’t particularly distinctive. Dottie Clark got some good words on her single’s A-side, a cover of the Vera Lynn World War II chestnut, “It’s Been a Long Long Time” (“ . . . strong, moving reading
from the thrush with a slow rockaballad tempo . . .” said
Billboard
), but nothing happened with the record.

Berns cut Little Jimmy Dee doing his “I Should Have Listened” for the Infinity label (“an interchange of his vocal and chorus effects, on a touching weeper,” said
Billboard
). He produced a girl-group version of the Mellin catalog’s key nugget, “You You You,” by a female quartet called the Flamettes on Laurie, but that was in no way a good idea. Berns didn’t get any production credit for the Arthur Prysock record of his “One More Time” on Old Town, but Berns’s stamp is all over the record—from the call-and-response gospel chorus to the Cuban rhythms and flute part that could have come from an Esy Morales record.