Here Comes the Night (34 page)

Although Berns undoubtedly copped the basic blueprint for the song from the version of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” on the first album by Bob Dylan, the song has a long history in the folk process, as Dylan himself alludes in his recording, crediting his version—although not sharing the copyright—to Boston folksinger Eric Von Schmidt. Arranger Garry Sherman heard Berns raving about a Dylan concert he attended. Berns and Farrell used the song’s basic framework for a very slight rewrite, punching up the old blues lyrics for today’s hit parade, moving the song into a driving closing section that owes more to the Isley Brothers’ “Shout.” But folksinger Josh White also has a version of the song well known in folk circles at the time (both White and Dylan also did the old blues, “The House of the Rising Sun,” that Most likewise recorded with the Animals in the same February recording session).

Vocalist Eric Burdon recognized the song from blind New Orleans blues singer Snooks Eaglin’s “Mama Don’t You Tear My Clothes,” another variant of the song, and knew that Berns and Farrell had given the old blues a pop slant that his group could work. The Animals’ version of Berns and Farrell’s “Baby Let Me Take You Home”—an arrangement almost identical to the demo Berns and Farrell recorded that served as the basis for their Mustangs record, not yet released—made a respectable showing at number twenty-one on the U.K. charts, but “The House of the Rising Sun” exploded into a worldwide number one smash after it was released in June 1964.

With his next signing, the Manchester group Herman’s Hermits, Most went straight to Gerry Goffin and Carole King for a cover of “I’m into Something Good,” a song Goffin and his wife King composed specifically for his pregnant mistress, Earl-Jean McCrea, lead vocalist of the Cookies. Goffin, who fathered a child out of wedlock with McCrea in July, produced the Earl-Jean version for the Columbia–Screen Gems label Colpix, which made a modest chart showing around the same time their daughter was born. Herman’s Hermits took the song three months later to number one in the U.K. and number thirteen in the United States.

South African jazz pianist Manfred Mann arrived in the U.K. only in 1962, but quickly got with the program. His beat group cut the first theme song to British TV’s
Ready Steady Go!
—“5-4-3-2-1”—which hit the British Top Five in early 1964, but when his band covered the Jeff Barry–Ellie Greenwich song originally recorded the year before by the Exciters, “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy,” the Manfred Mann record went number one that fall on both sides of the Atlantic. British beat was coming from New York.

The English record business was light-years behind New York, but they could see the maw of opportunity yawning before them in London. Nobody in New York understood this better than Berns, whose visit the previous October at the British high tide for his “Twist and Shout” led him to nurture promising business relationships with associates such as Mike Leander, Dick Rowe, and Phil Solomon. Unlike every other hot shot in New York, Berns had gone to England.

It was Dick Rowe’s idea to bring Berns back to produce Them, the new Irish r&b group Phil Solomon had signed for management and Rowe picked up for Decca. Rowe had personally supervised the group’s first session at Decca’s London studios in July 1964, cutting seven tracks including the first single, the Slim Harpo song “Don’t Start Cryin’ Now.”

Mervyn Solomon found the band in Belfast, where Them had become an instant sensation when the group started the city’s first r&b club only a few months before. A local rock and roll band called
the Gamblers that modeled their sound on the American instrumental combo Johnny and the Hurricanes (“Red River Rock”) was thinking about going r&b, when bandleader Billy Harrison auditioned the former saxophone player for the show band the Monarchs. He was a short, redheaded nineteen-year-old who also sang named Van Morrison.

Recently returned from a brief visit in London, Morrison had been dazzled by r&b night at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 club featuring an English r&b band called Downliners Sect. He had only recently accepted a job as vocalist with one of the city’s top show bands, the Golden Eagles, but after his experience in London, Morrison was determined to play r&b. He joined the Gamblers on saxophone and harmonica, sharing vocal duties with guitarist Harrison. He was in the lineup when the band reemerged as Them in April 1964 at the Maritime Hotel in Belfast.

When Phil Solomon showed up with Dick Rowe in Belfast to see the band, his brother Mervyn Solomon paid to have fainting teenagers carried out of the hall, but Rowe had seen that before. He signed the group not out of any musical conviction, but because Phil Solomon was the band’s manager. He watched at the airport the next day as Solomon collected the signed contracts from all but one of the lads (one minor member, whose parents had other plans for his career, declined).

After the group’s Decca debut failed to leave much impression, Rowe suggested to Solomon they share the expense in bringing over Berns to produce the band’s crucial next single. He thought Berns could also work with Elaine and Derek, sixteen-year-old twins, already show business veterans, whom Solomon recently placed with Decca, as well as possibly other Decca acts such as Dave Berry or the Bachelors. Rowe, who was beginning to show some progress Stateside with his other r&b signing, the Rolling Stones, thought an American producer might help the group make a hit record. The Stones finally broke through to the top of the U.K. charts in August with “It’s All Over Now,” and the Animals’ “The House of the Rising Sun” was all over the place, so the climate for this music never looked better.

At Decca Studio Number Two in West Hampstead that October, Berns sat on a stool surrounded by the band, strumming his acoustic guitar and singing the group a song he wrote. He didn’t have much more than the song and a guitar riff. He had played them other tunes—he tried out “My Girl Sloopy” on them—but “Here Comes the Night” was the song. The group spent the next four days in the studio slowly building the bare-bones song into a record, Berns showing them how. By the time Solomon’s in-house musical director Phil Coulter, who was going to play organ, walked into the proceedings, it already sounded like a hit to him.

Berns was an American archetype, a species entirely unknown in Britain—the Broadway record man. He reeked of Pall Malls, cheap cologne, and hit records. Them’s Morrison was impressed that Berns wrote “I Don’t Want to Go On without You,” the cool B-side of his new Drifters hit. Since he was the producer, Berns called the shots and Decca’s rules were out. He allowed the evil overdubs and made the engineer reserve an empty track so he could bounce tracks and overdub as much as he wanted. He was not the British style—he won over surly Billy Harrison by walking through the room during a take, grabbing a drumstick, loudly bashing a cymbal several times, and telling the band, “Let’s get something cooking, lads.”

The band had already suffered through the indignity of having members replaced by session musicians during the first session with Dick Rowe. This time the group barely noticed when Berns brought in outside hands. Drummer Andy White, who substituted for Ringo Starr on the first Beatles session, took the kit, and on second guitar, Berns brought in a twenty-year-old British guitarist he met through Mike Leander and had used on the sessions the year before, named Jimmy Page.

Over the previous two years, the young guitarist had become a favorite session player whose guitar graced dozens of records, including a lot of work for Decca. On the previous Them session, Page played
for Dick Rowe as the band members glared at him and the other sidemen who took their places, but this time was different. And Page was used to that anyway. The Kinks had been irritated when producer Shel Talmy brought Page to play on the band’s early sessions; the Who didn’t care (Page played on sessions for both “You Really Got Me” and “I Can’t Explain”).

Berns showed Page the guitar part he salvaged from his Marv Johnson production the year before of “Come On and Stop.” Page changed the guitar positions, turned up the reverb, and sprayed gold into the sound.

Berns cut two songs with Them that final evening in the studio, starting with the band’s version of a John Lee Hooker blues. Page’s snarling guitar gives “Baby Please Don’t Go” a stinging introduction, rattling against an ominous rumbling bass, and Berns lets it run, but as with his American r&b records, it is the intensity of the lead vocal by Van Morrison that drives Berns’s production. A couple of additional session vocalists provided harmonies on “Here Comes the Night,” set off by Page’s incandescent guitar parts, but the production is primarily powered by the vocalist’s fierce commitment to the song’s stark vision.

Well, here it comes
.

Here comes the night
,

Here comes the night
,

Oh yeah
.

The long, the long, the long and lonely night

The night, the night, the night, the night

Here comes the night
.

—
HERE COMES THE NIGHT (BERT BERNS, 1964)

Leander and Berns turned around and cut the song again in the same studio the next week with Lulu, this time as a huge, symphonic pop ballad, opening with Lulu chanting
The night . . . the night . . . the night . . . the long and lonely night . . .
as the tympani, strings, and, once
again, Jimmy Page’s guitar go to work behind her and open up the song to epic dimensions.

Born Marie Lawrie, this diminutive sixteen-year-old Glaswegian scored Scotland’s first beat hit for Decca in May 1964 with her group Lulu and the Luvvers’ cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” in her almost freakish raspy voice. Berns and Leander cut five songs with the budding star, including the monumental “Here Comes the Night”; the Berns-Stoller “You’ll Never Leave Her”; a song credited to Bert Russell and Ilene Stuart, “I’ll Come Running Over”; and covers of Jerry Butler’s “He Will Break Your Heart” and the Rufus Thomas novelty, “That’s Really Some Good,” with Berns jumping in for a vocal duet on the choruses.

For the showbiz twins, Elaine and Derek Thompson, Berns churned out a piece of infantilized pop, “Teddy Bears and Hobby Horses” and a feckless cover of his Linda Laurie record from earlier in the year, “Jose He Say.”

The Lulu version of “Here Comes the Night” spent one week on the U.K. charts in November, then disappeared forever, a lost pop classic. “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Them was released in November with a song on the B-side from the initial Dick Rowe sessions written by vocalist Van Morrison, “Gloria.” The single almost sank without a trace, except Phil Solomon wouldn’t say die.

Long after Decca gave up, Solomon convinced producer Vicki Wickham of TV’s
Ready Steady Go!
to use “Baby Please Don’t Go” as the show’s theme for two months. The record went back on the charts after two weeks and into the Top Ten in January 1965. When Them’s “Here Comes the Night” was released in March 1965, the record sold a spectacular sixteen thousand copies the first day and went all the way to number two in England. (In the United States, “Gloria,” long considered a rock classic, spent exactly one week on the charts at number ninety-three and “Here Comes the Night” crawled as far up the pop charts as number twenty-four.)

With the new breed of British producers such as Mickie Most or Andrew Loog Oldham of the Rolling Stones trying as hard as they could to make records that sounded American, Berns was the first American producer trying to make records that sounded British. He instantly understood the dynamics of the five-piece rock combo. The instruments on the Them session were voiced and recorded like no other British records of the time, but the way these young musicians handled their instruments was a different world from the New York classicists. There were also no shortage of parallels between these working-class youth of Great Britain and the black recording artists on Berns’s records back in the States.

Berns cast a wary eye at what he saw happening in England. As a favor to Phil Solomon, he dropped by the London audition of a Welsh singer named Tommy Scott, whom Dick Rowe had recommended. Solomon lost interest in the singer after Berns told him his boy was “no Elvis.” The singer went back to Wales and found another manager, who changed his name to Tom Jones.

Berns sat in a pub around the corner from the West Hampstead tube station one afternoon before one of the Them sessions talking with journalist Nik Cohn, who also came from Ireland. Surrounded by these scruffy hooligans and malcontents from the other side of Belfast, Berns was having problems understanding their thick brogues and tried to enlist Cohn into helping translate for him. Cohn was not tempted.

Cohn knew that Berns had a flair for the dramatic. He had interviewed Berns over lunch earlier at a fancy London restaurant for
The Observer
. Cohn had asked Berns, somewhat innocently, what pop was about. Berns turned from the table and loudly said, “Waiter.” Three gentlemen in white appeared almost instantly and Berns produced a cigarette to face a wall of flame from the waiters. He turned back to Cohn. “Wouldn’t you say,” he asked, “that’s what pop’s about?”

But this afternoon in the pub, wrestling with the communication difficulties with his charges and other challenges of the evening’s
session and beyond that lay ahead, he was more rueful. Berns thumbed a British music magazine, opened to a photograph of the Beatles, which he regarded grimly. “Those boys have genius,” he said. “They may be the ruin of us all.”

Meanwhile back in the States, with Berns taking over at Atlantic and having walked on Art Talmadge at UA, Leiber and Stoller found themselves without any ready outlets for their music and running out of money. Without a label behind them, they had to pay the studio bills themselves. Mike Stoller had grimly informed his partner that their bank account was down below $20,000 only a couple of hours before Jerry Leiber walked into Al and Dick’s steakhouse and found Hy Weiss cracking wise with George Goldner in March 1964.