Here Comes the Night (25 page)

When Florence Greenberg heard Dionne singing on the Bacharach demos, she loved the voice so much, she signed the young singer. Greenberg, however, didn’t care for the song “Make It Easy on Yourself,” so they recorded the number instead with Butler for Vee-Jay. Their first record with her for Scepter, “Don’t Make Me Over,” came back from the pressing plant with her name misspelled as Dionne Warwick—instead of Warrick—but her career was launched with the December 1962 release under the new name.

After a pair of more modest successes, Bacharach and David cut Dionne Warwick singing both “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and “Walk on By” in the same morning session. They went to lunch and argued about which one to release first.

Cissy Houston took her place in the group. These women had been singing together since their days in the New Hope choir—Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, Estelle Brown, and Dionne’s sister Dee Dee, who started calling herself Dee Dee Warwick to conform to her sister’s new last name. Most background groups had three members, but Houston liked to add a fourth voice on the bottom doubling the top part for a richer, fuller sound. She made more money recording two days in New York than she did working an entire week at RCA. She quit the factory job and devoted herself to singing with the girls on other people’s records. They brought the power and majesty of a gospel choir to every session they did.

The arrangers customarily wrote charts to the producer’s specifications. Obviously with a Burt Bacharach record, the arrangement was as much a part of the composition as the lyric and the melody. He broke open the songs’ tempos, using different time signatures to surround, support, and expand on Hal David’s lyrics. He wrote what the passage required and, if that meant going from 5/4 to 7/8 or 7/4 and then back again to 4/4, that’s what he wrote. His charts used to intimidate the session players, although these guys all prided themselves on being able to read fly dung, but the tempo changes threw them. Bacharach would tell them to run through the number with him and let the interior logic of the piece open up and, invariably, it did.

Old-time guys like Teacho Wiltshire or Bert Keyes would be penciling in changes at the start of the session, going over the charts with the producer, before passing them out at the last minute to the musicians, already tuning up, getting ready to play. Garry Sherman was new to the r&b scene. He was a podiatrist who shared a private practice with his brother in Jersey and took some time off to write music. He recorded an album,
Percussion Goes Dixieland
, that came out on Columbia and Mike Stoller discovered. Stoller hired the jazz doctor to write some pop charts for them and tore apart the first thing Sherman brought them. The second was “She Cried,” the Jay and the Americans million-seller.

Sherman was more orchestrator than arranger, but worked with each producer differently. Leiber and Stoller always wanted to thin out the palette, make every stroke, tinkle, and plunk count. Berns spent long evenings in his penthouse with Sherman, playing him records and pointing out this horn part, that guitar break, just generally introducing his new favorite arranger to the vocabulary of the funky blues.

Bell Sound on Broadway and Fifty-Fourth Street had been the top independent studio in town since it opened in the early fifties. Eddie Smith’s crack engineering crew kept the equipment running, as opposed to Mira Sound, a dump on the second floor of the Americana,
a hotbed hotel for hookers on West Forty-Seventh Street, where nothing worked, but everything sounded great. The horrid bathroom doubled as a first-rate echo chamber.

Tommy Dowd always ran a tight ship at Atlantic Studios. He installed the first Ampex eight-track recorder and never looked back. His clean, clear engineering was a hallmark of his recordings, whether the Drifters or John Coltrane was on the other side of the glass. The former nuclear physicist was always Atlantic’s secret weapon.

In 1958, engineer Phil Ramone opened his A&R Studios on the site of a former film studio on West Forty-Eighth Street, a massive forty-eight-by-thirty-eight-foot room with a soft cement floor and a miracle sound. He was a child prodigy violinist who played for Queen Elizabeth at age ten and graduated from Juilliard when he was sixteen. He recorded in studio orchestras around town as a musician, but gravitated toward an interest in recording science.

Ramone knew the signature of a studio was its echo, and he and his partner installed adjustable tempered steel plates called EMTs that worked better than tiled bathrooms. When Dowd couldn’t use Atlantic because he needed a larger studio for an orchestral date, he would take the session to A&R, beginning with the
The Genius of Ray Charles
album. Other producers started to come to A&R when Bell Sound was booked. By the time Ramone engineered at A&R the shimmering Stan Getz/João Gilberto record, “The Girl From Ipanema,” in March 1963, the studio’s reputation was secure.
*

Studio insiders compared A&R’s sound to the fabled cavernous Thirtieth Street studio of Columbia Records, one of the hallowed halls of New York recording, along with Decca Records’ Pythian Temple, where Bill Haley and His Comets recorded the rim shot heard round the world
on “Rock around the Clock,” and RCA Victor’s Webster Hall, home of all those sumptuous Living Stereo classical recordings. A&R made that kind of rich, luxurious sound available to New York independents.

The public thought of the singers as the artists, the people with their names large on the labels, but the industry knew better. The singers were almost interchangeable, in some ways, the most disposable part of the equation. At the sessions, more attention would be paid to the highly paid instrumentalists, the arrangements, the studio setup, or even background vocalists than the titular star of the recording. These were the workers who actually made the record. The producer pulled all the parts together—the songs, the musicians, the studio, the arranger, the record deal, even the artist—but everything depended on the song, which made the songwriter king.

The remarkable songwriters of the era were at the center of what was happening in New York. A few songwriting teams in particular began to blossom above all others and started to produce extraordinary work, many under the encouragement of Leiber and Stoller, who directed the evolving art form from their offices in the Brill Building.

The songwriters began to stage their songs in New York. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s “Uptown” by the Crystals used the uptown/ downtown geography of Manhattan to vividly represent class struggle, a song whose decided big-city ethnic flavor was brought out even more by Phil Spector’s faux-Spanish production. Leiber dreamed up another romantic urban fantasy, “Spanish Harlem,” with young Spector. In their most elegantly crafted song yet, Carole King and Gerry Goffin built an imaginary world that could have been nowhere else on this planet in “Up on the Roof.”

Most pointed of all, Mann and Weil fashioned an epic out of their own life, setting the song on the pavements beneath their office windows in “On Broadway,” the colossal Drifters record Leiber and Stoller produced in January 1963. Leiber and Stoller also worked on the Mann-Weil song, writing the bridge, straightening out the lyric.
Stoller messed around with the key and changed the finish of the crucial opening line, going up instead of down on the word “Broadway.” On their way to lunch before the session, they ran into Phil Spector on the sidewalk and invited him. He showed up at the studio with his guitar and ended up playing the solo on the instrumental break.

With “Up on the Roof” and “On Broadway,” Leiber and Stoller once again reprieved the Drifters from slipping off the charts entirely. It had been two long years since “Save the Last Dance for Me.” In April 1963, they returned to the studio with the Drifters and another Mann-Weil song they had remodeled. Originally “Only in America” was more of an angry, straightforward protest song (
Only in America, land of opportunity, do they save a seat in the back of the bus just for me
). The civil rights movement was reaching crisis proportions. New harrowing headlines came daily from the South. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and placed in solitary confinement on the day of the session a thousand miles away in Birmingham, Alabama. Leiber and Stoller, from their rarified, socially advanced perspective, as only two smartass, New York Jews could, recast the song as a coolly ironic sendup (having black people sing lines like
Only in America can a kid without a cent get a break and maybe grow up to be president
).

Wexler was predictably blunt in his assessment. “Are you guys nuts?” he said. “They’ll lynch us.”

The world was not ready to hear black people sing
Only in America, land of opportunity
. Leiber was way too hip for the room. Leiber and Stoller still liked the track immensely. They took off the Drifters vocals and replaced them with Jay and the Americans. White people singing the same song entirely eliminated all irony, turning the record into the kind of cornball sentimentality that Leiber and Stoller previously assiduously avoided. Wexler hated the record so much, he was happy to sell the track to United Artists for something he was never going to release and didn’t even mind as the thing scooted up the charts. Not much anyway.

Leiber and Stoller’s next record with Ben E. King showed up almost out of the blue. They tumbled to an Italian pop song called “Uno Dei Tanti (One of Many)” written by Carlo Donida and lyrcist Giulio “Mogol” Reppti and sung in Italian by Joe Sentieri. Leiber rewrote the song in English and they had Ben E. King put his vocal on top of the original Italian orchestral track. “I (Who Have Nothing),” a Top Thirty record that summer, sounded like nothing else to ever come out of the New York r&b world—stormy, gothic, melodramatic—although it was more a feat of legerdemain by cunning record men than a musical creation all their own. Ultimately, they were becoming ever more remote from the source of their original inspiration. If they thought Wexler was a pain, they were also having problems over at United Artists with Art Talmadge. He kept pressing them for a bigger piece of their publishing and he was having political problems of his own at the label. He had them producing such hogwash as easy listening piano duo Ferrante and Teicher doing “The Theme from ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’”

CAROLE KING AND
Gerry Goffin were flying high. They moved to suburban splendor in a new development on a treeless hillside in New Jersey—the doorbell played “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” swimming pool and barbeque in the back—only a short distance from where Aldon publisher Donny Kirshner lived in a mansion. His limousine would stop by to pick up demo tapes (Kirshner never learned to drive). They had their fourth number one hit in two years with Steve Lawrence singing “Go Away Little Girl,” pure piffle, but piffle that sold.

Kirshner was close friends with the staid show business couple Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme—Berns’s first great discovery all those years before in the Bronx—and also supplied his wife with “Blame It on the Bossa Nova,” featherweight fluff from Mann and Weill. Barry Mann played an energetic organ riff on the cutesy record, which also featured vaguely soulful background vocals by the Cookies,
Aldon’s own girl group, whom Gerry Goffin had taken under his wing as a producer for the in-house label, Dimension.

Kirshner started the label the previous year because Carole King’s demo for “It Might as Well Rain until September” sounded so much better than the Bobby Vee version. Gerry Goffin sweetened the track a little and the King single loped into the Top Thirty in fall 1962, but her husband ruled out any further singles by his wife. King had recently given birth to their second daughter, Sherry. Lyricist Goffin, who was smitten with Broadway musicals and had ambitions as a songwriter beyond the simple pop songs he and his wife composed, couldn’t read music or play an instrument. He struggled to communicate with his songwriting partner, who was a deft musician with a solid commercial sense. With Goffin frustrated at trying to explain his musical vision, their writing sessions would break down into yelling matches. But the young mother was clearly in love with her husband, who may have seen her more as the girl he got pregnant.

Goffin had produced the irresistible “The Loco-Motion” for Little Eva, the label’s number one hit the previous summer, but fumbled at follow-up efforts. He and another Aldon writer, Jack Keller, slapped together a dance song novelty, “Let’s Turkey Trot,” Keller substituting the melody from the Cleftones’ “Little Girl of Mine” for a finished melody he would supply later. Kirshner loved the song as it was, and when it was released, it turned out that George Goldner’s writer’s share of the 1955 hit he produced now belonged to Morris Levy, who insisted that both he and Herbie Cox of the Cleftones be added as writers to the Little Eva song and collected an appropriate apology, even though the original song was lifted directly from a public domain gospel song. Levy liked his copyrights.

Goffin also was producing the Cookies, Aldon’s girl group with a pedigree. The original Cookies cut r&b hits for Atlantic and sang backgrounds on a Ray Charles session where they so impressed the singer, he hired them for his band and renamed them the Raelettes. When her
older sister went off with Ray Charles, Earl-Jean McCrea, a shy, pretty young lady with a sweet, attractive voice who grew up in largely white Coney Island, took her place in a reconstituted edition of the Cookies. Goffin recorded the new Cookies on the Goffin-King song “Chains,” which made the Top Twenty at the beginning of the year, followed in March 1963 by the Top Ten smash “Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad (About My Baby),” a steely admonition of a song featuring the saucy riposte
So girl, you better shut your mouth
.

In February 1963, Aldon swept the BMI Awards for the second year in a row. But, at the end of March, with the new Cookies hit flying up the charts, the bombshell went off. Aldon songwriters first read about it in the trades—Donny Kirshner was negotiating the sale of Aldon with the motion picture–television studio Columbia–Screen Gems. When the deal finally went down, Kirshner and partner Al Nevins took somewhere around $2.5 million in cash and stock. Kirshner stayed on as Columbia–Screen Gems vice president in charge of music. The office at 1650 Broadway moved to new quarters at 711 Fifth Avenue, next door to Tiffany’s.