Here Comes the Night (41 page)

Everybody knew Morris Levy was connected. It was what allowed him to be as difficult as he was. Levy prided himself on being a character. He could be disingenuously charming, but he could also be bluntly intimidating. He loved money and hated to pay royalties, rarely bothered to, in fact. He grew up in the Bronx running the streets as children
with Genovese lieutenant Vincent “The Chin” Gigante. The doorman at the Majestic, where the target lived, made Gigante as the gunman in the unsuccessful 1957 hit of Mob captain Frank Costello, who earned the right to live out his life in quiet retirement by refusing to rat out Gigante.

The shooter made off that night in a car the cops always figured was driven by another rising Genovese star, Tommy Eboli, who knew Levy since he was a teenager running his little nightclub darkroom racket. Eboli, who was also known as Tommy Ryan, went back to the original Lucky Luciano gang. He managed Gigante’s brief prizefighting career. His own career in the sport ended after he climbed over the ropes and beat the hell out of a referee whose judgment he disputed during a middleweight match by one of his fighters at Madison Square Garden in 1952 (he went back to the dressing room and, with his brother, also beat up the matchmaker). He was convicted of assault and banned for life from the sport.

Among Eboli’s many and varied business interests were cigarette machines and jukeboxes, which made his company a valued customer of New York area record distributors—all long before he became the best friend of Bert Berns.

Nate McCalla often played in those card games at Roulette. He was an extra-large black man who could affix a highly severe look on his face but could also be warm and affable. Reputedly a former master sergeant in the military police, McCalla was Levy’s close friend and enforcer. Physically imposing, tall, wide McCalla was the man for tough jobs.

In addition to his work with Levy, McCalla also ran a number of record business operations with Sonny Franzese, the dapper don of the Colombo family who looked like prizefighter Rocky Graziano and was tossed out of the army during World War II as a homicidal psycho. Among other enterprises, McCalla and Franzese managed girl group chart-toppers the Angels, whose “My Boyfriend’s Back” put
songwriters Bob Feldman, Richard Gottehrer, and Jerry Goldstein at number one for the first time.

Franzese loved the glamour of the record business and knew people all over 1650 Broadway. He was a silent partner in Kama Sutra Productions, independent production and music publishing guys who held the paper on the Shangri-Las before Red Bird signed the girls. When Goldner tried to muscle Kama Sutra out of the deal through Morris Levy, Franzese quickly straightened that out behind the scenes.

McCalla and Franzese were also welcome visitors to the Scepter Records office. Actually, Sonny Franzese was welcome pretty much anywhere he wanted to go. Songwriter Richard Gottehrer watched in amazement one night, joining Franzese for a sold-out show at the Copa, while waiters scurried around, pushing aside already seated tables, to bring a fresh table out of the back so that the don could have front-row seating for his party. He was the show business Godfather. Sinatra made a point of kissing his ring while Franzese was having dinner one night at Al and Dick’s with his capo, Joe Columbo.

Nate McCalla owed some dough to a loan shark around Broadway named Sammy Bush. McCalla, who knew Sammy would be looking for him, dropped by Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein’s office and asked them to tell Sammy he was expecting a little money in a couple of weeks, he was leaving town in the meantime, but he was good for it.

A week later, Gottehrer and Goldstein, walking back to the office, were shocked to see their partner Bobby Feldman backed up against the office building by a pair of large, intimidating hoodlums who wanted to know where was Sammy’s $7,500. These business associates of Sammy’s were unwilling or unable to make any important distinction between the absent Nate McCalla owing the money and birds in hand. But, as they were not entirely unreasonable men, they agreed to meet the three at the same time, five days later, at the same place, on the sidewalk outside 1650 Broadway.

Five days later, still no McCalla, the hapless songsmiths decided to meet the thugs and frankly admit they didn’t have the money. As they approached the pair in front of the building at the appointed time, Gottehrer noticed over their shoulders a taxicab pulling up to the sidewalk and emerging from the backseat his nightclubbing buddy John “Sonny” Franzese.

“Uncle John,” Gottehrer shouted, steering a path around the waiting thugs to the outstretched embrace of the Colombo underboss. When he turned around, they were gone.

A week after that, Gottehrer was riding the elevator down at 1650 Broadway when it stopped at another floor and the same two hoods walked in the cab. Gottehrer braced himself. “Hey, sorry ’bout all that,” said one. “You don’t owe us any money. We didn’t know you was connected.”

Gottehrer went up to the racetrack at Monticello with Nate and Sonny and a Jewish fixer named Morris Spokane, who had his hooks into Florence Greenberg. She gave him a piece of the company to stop the bootleggers, who were Spokane’s buddies in the first place. These guys had a horse wired in one race, but the trainer overjacked the nag with the drugs and the damn horse dropped dead on the track, only after everybody got their bets down.

There were guys running around under the clubhouse with their guns out, looking for the trainer. Spokane told everybody he couldn’t get their money back, but he could get them some clothes. He drove them all into downtown Monticello to a men’s clothing store and made the owner come down with his wife and open the store. They lost at the track, but they loaded up with sweaters and jackets on the way home. These guys were a million laughs.

Jerry Leiber was on his way to the office when he stopped and bought a pair of suspenders for his boys, Oliver and Jed, from a sidewalk stand. He was spending several days a week with the family at their East Hampton place those days, less time in the city. He
was walking down Broadway when a large, genial black man sidled up beside him, stretched his arm over Leiber’s shoulder, and smiled. “You’re Jerry Leiber, aren’t you?” he said.

Leiber did not know Nate McCalla, but he was frightened as the man explained that he and some friends wanted to talk to him and steered Leiber into a little Broadway deli on the same block as the Brill Building that he had never noticed before. In the back, sitting at the flimsy Formica tables while a couple of other large goons hovered behind him, was Sonny Franzese.

“I wanted to meet our new partner,” he said.

Leiber sat in terror as the mobster bantered with him, ordering Leiber something to eat, talking in riddles about Catholics going to see their priest when they’re in trouble. “Where does a Jewboy go when he’s in trouble?” he asked.

“To his lawyer,” said Leiber. Everybody laughed.

“No,” said Franzese. “A Jewboy goes to his rabbi, and right now, I’m your rabbi.”

Leiber quickly realized that George Goldner had fallen in arrears with shylocks, and all those recent closed-door meetings everybody tried so hard to ignore at the office, all those strange visitors using the conference room and leaving with stacks of albums, had led to this sordid, scary scene under fluorescent lights in the back room of this two-bit deli. Franzese noticed the paper bag with the suspenders. “You got kids,” he said. “I got kids, too.” A chill rippled through Leiber.

Back at the office, Leiber and Stoller angrily confronted Goldner, who picked up the phone and called Morris Levy. While his two partners listened, Goldner railed at Moishe about the mobsters snatching Leiber—he used the Yiddish term for gangsters,
richtiga
—but it was a charade strictly for the benefit of Leiber and Stoller. The songwriters were worried. Leiber sought the advice of his father-in-law Saemy Rosenberg, who invited Leiber to join him for lunch with his close friend Guy de Rothschild at Luchow’s, a century-old restaurant
near Union Square. “What do they want from you, Jerry, money?” his father-in-law said. “Anything you can buy for money is cheap.”

On a chilly Monday morning in March, Leiber and Stoller walked into their partner’s office at Red Bird Records, a Brill Building suite adjacent to the Trio Music offices. Goldner, dressed as always like a prosperous banker, his diamond pinkie ring matching his cuff links, was reading the
Daily Racing Form
, his feet on his desk.

“We want to sell you the company,” they told Goldner, who thought they were kidding, at first, and then complained he didn’t have enough money. They told him the price for their two-thirds of the label was $1.

That morning, afraid he would go to the track and lose anything he had, his wife had taken all Goldner’s cash out of his wallet before he left for work. Goldner didn’t even have $1. Stoller extracted a bill from his pocket and handed it to Goldner, who, somewhat bewildered, nevertheless passed along the dollar bill to Leiber. Leiber and Stoller left his office out of the record business. The next day workmen put up a wall between the offices.

STILL WORKING AT
the Leiber and Stoller offices, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, freshly divorced, brought Neil Diamond up to the Bang Records office for him to play his songs for Bert Berns. He sat on the couch and strummed his blacktop Everly Brothers model Gibson. Berns liked what he heard.

Greenwich met the young songwriter when she was hired to sing background vocals on one of his demos ten months earlier, before her marriage collapsed. She and Barry first took Diamond to Leiber and Stoller, who signed him for three months as a songwriter at Trio Music. But Barry and Greenwich wanted more. They decided to sign Diamond to a partnership, Tallyrand Music, split fifty-fifty between Diamond and the then-married couple. They went into their own pockets to pay Diamond his $150 weekly salary, twice what he was making at Trio Music. Leiber and Stoller finally used one of his Trio Music songs,
“Sunday and Me,” with Jay and the Americans. Diamond moved into a small Long Island house with his pregnant wife.

Diamond grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a dry goods store. As a teenager, he heard another camper at a liberal summer camp they attended play a song the other kid had written for folksinger Pete Seeger. Young Diamond went home and started writing songs. He made a couple of records, including a big-time single on Columbia that came and went. He showed songwriter Artie Resnick a crumpled cocktail napkin from his pocket with his name embossed, a souvenir from the label’s little reception for his record release.

Despite many years knocking around the Midtown music scene, he had failed to make any lasting impression until Ellie Greenwich heard him.

The twenty-five-year-old songwriter had bounced among various Broadway music publishers for years without getting many of his songs even recorded. When he met Greenwich, he had been working for months by himself in a room he rented above Birdland on Fifty-Second Street where he installed a pay phone so he wouldn’t be tempted to waste time and money making calls.

Berns shared the enthusiasm of Barry and Greenwich. He signed Diamond to Bang and took personal interest in every part of Diamond’s work for the label. He participated in all the preproduction meetings and brought engineer Brooks Arthur onboard. Berns told Arthur he thought Neil Diamond was like an Elvis. When Barry and Greenwich heard a guitar lick they liked, Diamond expanded on the figure and came back with a piece of Latinized rock and roll right down Bert Berns’s alley that he called “Money Money.”

When they played it for Berns, he complained. “What’s with this ‘Money, Money’ stuff?” Berns said. “It should be ‘Baby, Baby’ or ‘Cherie, Cherie.’ That’s it—‘Cherry, Cherry.’”

Barry put the finishing touches on the chorus in minutes. They took Artie Butler into Dick Charles Studios on Seventh Avenue to cut
a demo. Diamond played guitar. Session musician Dick Romoff played upright bass and Butler handled piano and organ. There were no drums.

When Barry and Greenwich emerged from the first official Bang sessions for Diamond in February 1966, they had three songs—“Solitary Man,” “I Got the Feeling (Oh No No),” and a fully produced “Cherry, Cherry” with drums and a horn section. Berns liked the demo better. He also liked “Solitary Man” as the first single for mid-February.
BANG RECORDS PROUDLY ANNOUNCES THE BIRTH OF A GREAT NEW ARTIST
said the full-page trade magazine ads.

In little more than six months, eight of the first fifteen releases by Bang Records had hit the charts. Berns was featured on the cover of
Record World
magazine in February, talking about his upcoming sessions with the Drifters for Atlantic and the pending release on Bang by a new artist who would use all three names, Neil Leslie Diamond.
*

Berns told
Record World
,

I’ll only record a song if I think it’s a hit. Record the best artist with a mediocre song and results are going to be mediocre. And a good song has to have a strong point of view. That’s what I’ve tried to write for the new Drifters session—a song with a point of view. Their best songs had it—“Under the Boardwalk,” “Up on the Roof.” When I record Solomon Burke, I have to give him a tune that is very meaningful in performance. He couldn’t sing something like “Everybody do the something or other.” I was with him once when a fan—a grown man—came up to him with tears in his eyes and said, “Solomon, when you sing, you’re singing about me.”

The rhythm and blues world struggled to keep pace with the changes in the black community. Berns knew the music was in transition. “I want to do more r&b,” he told
Record World
, “because, for one
reason, r&b artists sustain longer than most pop artists. Right now I have the Exciters on the label, although they haven’t recorded a soul song yet.” Soul, he said, was elusive. “I can’t think of any white artists who have it,” he said, “because soul is more than saying ‘ah’ for ‘I.’ It’s something that comes from within—an artist’s singing, and frequently, writing, about something he uniquely feels.”