Here Comes the Night (38 page)

At the same time, Berns was having no problems putting Barbara Lewis on the charts. Lewis, who two years before had come out of nowhere to rescue Atlantic after a long chart drought, was discovered by Ann Arbor deejay Ollie McLaughlin, a family friend who also discovered and managed the Battle Creek, Michigan, rock and roller who called himself Del Shannon (“Runaway”). Lewis had regional hits around Detroit before her big 1963 hit, “Hello Stranger,” and even cut one session with the house band at the Motown studios while that operation was still small-time. Since her Atlantic hit, her subsequent releases had not performed up to expectations. Wexler decided to bring her to New York to record with Berns.

He found “Baby I’m Yours” by songwriter Van McCoy, who used to write for Florence Greenberg at Scepter and Leiber and Stoller at Trio but was now working out of April/Blackwood. It was the first time in her career that Lewis had been told what to sing—at age twenty, she wrote almost every song on the “Hello Stranger” album—and she
didn’t feel good about the number. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the song; it was that songwriter McCoy’s assured vocal on the demo left little room for improvement, as far as she could see. Her first New York City session and she was not comfortable. Over the talk-back, her manager McLaughlin could not conceal his frustration, something she’d never seen before.

“Okay, Barb,” he told her, “just go ahead and sing it, like what’s good for you. Don’t worry about your part. We can get that later. Let’s just get the take. Get the orchestrations and the music right.”

Lewis overdubbed her vocals weeks later in Chicago, kidded and chided into the performance by McLaughlin. She needn’t have worried. Berns had her every step of the way. From the opening downbeat, he lays out a carpet of silken background vocals and soft, pillowy orchestrations that let the song do all the lifting. The effect is an effortless production that gently floats into streams of light and warmth, bathed in strings and horns. Lewis underplays the vocal magnificently and everything works. The song bubbled under the Top Ten at number eleven that summer.

Berns did two more sessions over the year with the subtle but immensely appealing songstress and came out of each with at least one powerful track: “Make Me Your Baby,” which served as a fine follow-up for “Baby I’m Yours,” likewise scraping the Top Ten at number eleven, and Goffin and King’s “Don’t Forget about Me,” a tour de force production that may have been musically too demanding for the audience but featured Lewis brilliantly. She emerged from behind the mike at one session to find Berns in the control room wiping his eyes, moved to tears by her performance.

Berns worked hard keeping Atlantic in the Drifters business, pumping out a sparkling new single every three months by the vocal group, growing long in the tooth and far out of style. Including “Saturday Night at the Movies,” which was released in December 1964, Berns managed to put six Drifters songs on the charts during the next year,
although the group continued to experience diminished returns since the high point the previous summer of “Under the Boardwalk.”

Berns ran into Tony Orlando in the elevator at 1650. “I always liked that record, ‘Halfway to Paradise,’” he told the singer. “We ought to make some records together.” Orlando, at loose ends since Aldon was sold, was between record deals. He had cut a lovely number with Bacharach and David for Epic that nobody heard and was beginning to work in publishing, thinking his singing career might be over at age twenty-one. A chance meeting in an elevator was all he needed for Berns to refresh his recollection.

Berns signed him to Atlantic. Orlando always wanted to be with the label and was even more thrilled when he was assigned to Atco, the label where his hero Bobby Darin had reigned. Berns did two of his songs with Orlando, a soulful vocalist who sang all those Drifters demos for Goffin and King, “Turn Around,” and “Half as Much,” but Wexler never released them.

Berns had very little time outside his Atlantic projects and the new company, although he did manage sessions with the Exciters, the group that made “Tell Him” a hit, now signed to Morris Levy and Roulette Records. Brenda Reid tore into two fiery new Berns compositions, “Run Mascara Run,” and “There They Go,” a bald rewrite of “Here Comes the Night,” and Berns gave the productions the high drama of the other Exciters records (“Should hit fast and furious,” said
Billboard
).

The Sal Mineo session was a favor for Miltie Ross, one of the regulars at Al and Dick’s, a sleazy old big band pop singer who loved whores so much he married one. Ross was an oversized, shady character who always had something going in the background. If Miltie was around, the fix was in or somebody was looking for something they couldn’t get regularly. He operated out of Award Music in the Brill Building, where he signed songwriters like Paul Kaufman (“Poetry in Motion”) or Gregory Carroll (“Just One Look”) when he wasn’t at the racetrack. He had some deal with Atlantic to produce masters for the label with
Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, the Vibrations, and a few others. Berns cut the Hollywood movie star, just starting his slide down the backside of the bell curve, singing “Save the Last Dance for Me” for Big Miltie, who had a deal for Mineo at Fontana Records.

When Berns went back to England in May 1965, this time not only did Ilene and baby Brett join him, but also Wexler and his wife, Shirley. Phil Solomon installed the party in a service flat in Knightsbridge, around the corner from an old pub where Berns liked to dine. They arranged for an English nanny. Berns bought his wife her first British raincoat. Solomon called for them for dinner in a Daimler limousine.

Berns was scheduled to conduct sessions with Them for the group’s coming debut album, but first he worked with another Belfast r&b act from the Maritime Hotel who called themselves the Mad Lads before Solomon renamed them Moses K and the Prophets, since there was already an American soul group called the Mad Lads. Berns met the group in a Soho nightclub and showed them a pair of songs on his acoustic guitar.

He took the band into Regent Sounds Studio on Denmark Street in central London, a seedy hole-in-the-wall where Andrew Oldham had been making all those Rolling Stones records. The control room was about the size of a small bathroom and the studio wasn’t any bigger than a modest hotel room, but it got a great sound out of cramped conditions and egg carton ceiling. Berns knocked off a solid single with Moses K and the Prophets of a jaunty, Latinized Berns original, “I Went Out with My Baby Tonight,” and a cover of the Drifters’ “Answer the Phone,” a record Berns had produced earlier in the year.

He spent most of the week at Regent Sounds recording Them, pretty much the hot new British rock group of the moment. “Here Comes the Night” was sitting atop the British charts. The band had been squeezed on the massive bill at the Empire Pool in Wembley in April for the year-end
New Musical Express
poll winners, even though the group’s chart success was so recent Them hadn’t figured in any
of the voting. Nevertheless, there they were at a coronation of a new generation of British pop that assembled, under one roof, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones (the only occasion the two groups appeared on the same bill), the Kinks, the Animals, the Moody Blues, Freddie and the Dreamers, Dusty Springfield, among others. Them went on between Donovan and the Searchers and segued from their hit, “Here Comes the Night,” into an unexpected seven-minute workup of “Turn On Your Lovelight,” the staple barnstormer that closed the band’s sets at the Maritime Hotel.

Berns did five songs at Regent Sounds with the band. “I Gave My Love a Diamond” was an old folk song well known from the version by Josh White (which Berns nevertheless copyrighted as songwriter), driven in this instance by a vibrato flourish from guitarist Jimmy Page. Berns’s song about sending a lover away because she’s too young, “Go On Home Baby,” borrowed liberally from another old folk song, “Sloop John B,” familiar from the Kingston Trio’s first album, but sounded as tough as a Stones record. He pinched the background vocal part to the Berns-Farrell “My Little Baby” from Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange.”

Van Morrison gives each vocal performance the kind of rusty razor blade intensity that Berns was accustomed to getting from his American rhythm and blues vocalists. His accent so thoroughly colored his singing, nobody noticed his ad lib at the end of his largely improvised “Little Girl,” where he says “I want to fuck you.” The gaffe was not discovered until it was released on a British charity album that was, as a consequence, subsequently recalled.

Berns also cut with Them the song he recorded the month before in New York with Tony Orlando, “Half as Much.” It sounded like a gosh-darn Garnet Mimms record.

If you find your baby’s gone

And you don’t know where or when
.

You wonder, yes, you wonder

If you’ll ever see him again
.

Just remember, remember
,

These simple words that I brought

Soon it won’t hurt half as much

It won’t half as much

No, it won’t hurt half as much

As you thought
.

—
HALF AS MUCH (BERT BERNS, 1965)

The young men in Them sported bad attitudes, far beyond the cheeky wit of the Beatles or the surly hauteur of the Rolling Stones. After the band stood up the
New Musical Express
reporter three times for an interview, writer Keith Altham finally caught up with the musicians in a backroom of a pub near the studio. Morrison was sitting with Berns. “Fuck off,” he told the reporter. “Can’t you see I’m talking to Bert. You should be interviewing him—he’s the genius.”

Guitarist Billy Harrison picked his nails with a pocketknife while he gave short, angry answers to the hapless journalist, snapping off the interview by announcing he’d had enough “stupid questions.” Morrison watched from the sidelines, while Berns strummed loudly on his guitar.

The Berns and Wexler party took a side trip to Paris, leaving infant Brett in the care of his English nanny. They checked into a deluxe suite at the Hôtel de Crillon, the seventeenth-century palace on the Place de la Concorde. While Shirley Wexler took Ilene Berns to the museums and showed her the Impressionists, their husbands did business with their French music contacts.

It was at dinner at the home of his French subpublisher, Gerard Tournier, where Berns made an alarming discovery. Tournier toasted Berns’s great success over the meal and Berns pressed him for details. Tournier thought he had paid Bobby Mellin somewhere around $60,000 U.S. the previous year and estimated that 90 percent was for
Berns copyrights. Since Berns had been seeing checks from Mellin for something like $1,400, Berns smelled a rat.

Berns disliked the stuffy old bastard anyway, but to discover finally, irrefutably, that Bobby Mellin had been stealing from him, enraged Berns. But Mellin was prepared for subterfuge. He had learned of the pending sale negotiations between Atlantic and ABC. He threatened ABC privately that he was going to sue Atlantic over Berns and that buying the label would be “buying a lawsuit,” thinking that Wexler would pressure Berns not to queer the deal. Berns nevertheless pressed litigation for an accurate accounting. Mellin countered by filing a dubious lawsuit against Atlantic (and other companies) over pieces of songs that didn’t add up to much in the first place.

Regardless, documents for the sale to Atlantic Records were drawn up. ABC would pay $2,800,000 for Atlantic. The Erteguns and Wexler would receive three-year $35,000 contracts. It would have gone through, except for the pages and pages of warranties ABC’s corporate attorneys demanded. Atlantic could never warranty the company paid all its royalties. Some company less scrupulous would have to be found if this company, which may have operated too long in the gray ethical/financial world of rhythm and blues, was going to be sold.

Mellin quickly lost a judgment to Berns and coughed up a $60,000 settlement. Berns also won the right to audit Mellin’s international accounts. But now, Wexler was really growing panicky about selling the company.

Wexler went almost straight from Europe to Memphis with Wilson Pickett in May. He arranged with the Stax/Volt label that Atlantic distributed to bring Pickett into the Stax studio to work with the house band. Wexler was astonished at what he saw. After Tom Dowd came down to Memphis and tightened up the studio’s equipment, engineering the classic
Otis Blue
album with Stax/Volt’s Otis Redding in the process, the converted movie theater hummed with a sound all its own.

The house band was Booker T. and the M.G.’s, a tight-knit quartet, augmented by a few select regulars. There were no score sheets, no conductors, and no arrangers. They used what they called “head arrangements,” which means they made it up as they went along, often communicated with nothing more than a discreet nod across the room. These musicians operated with a scary unity of purpose; eight arms and legs, one mind.

In this densely collaborative environment, Pickett shaped “In the Midnight Hour” with Stax guitarist Steve Cropper, and Wexler danced the jerk in the studio for the band so they could get the rhythm right. He came home with three fresh Pickett tracks, including this certain hit, and had been exposed to an entirely different approach to recording. The informality and ease that permeates Southern life extended to the Memphis recording sessions, far from the concert hall atmosphere of the New York studios.

At the same time, Ahmet Ertegun was eyeing the new rock scene. He recognized the male singer in Caesar and Cleo, a Los Angeles duo, as a former promotion man for his Los Angeles distributor and one of Phil Spector’s toadies named Sonny Bono. His girlfriend was a background vocalist he knew from Spector sessions at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood, Cherilynn LaPier, known as Cher. Bono cooked up the act with arranger Harold Battiste, the brainy firebrand New Orleans sideman behind the AFO collective who moved to Los Angeles after it dissolved. They envisioned Bono as a kind of accessible version of Phil Spector and Cher as his girl groups. They cut a single for Warner Brothers, “Baby Don’t Go,” that flopped.