Here Comes the Night (47 page)
Baby, my heart is breaking
And there’s no hope, no hope inside
.
The sky is an ocean of darkness
,
No one, no one, no one to hold me
,
In the lonely night
.
—
HEART BE STILL (RAGOVOY-BERNS, 1967)
Ragovoy thought it audacious to tamper with a song held as sacred as “Peace Be Still,” but he nevertheless cut the record with Lorraine Ellison, the former gospel singer from Philadelphia brought to Ragovoy by Sam Bell of Garnett Mimms and the Enchanters. Ragovoy had produced Ellison the year before singing his explosive “Stay with Me,” an amazing record that fizzled out after a few weeks in the bottom reaches of the charts. “Heart Be Still” didn’t even fare that well when it came out that fall. It never occurred to Ragovoy that his songwriting partner was writing a lot about his heart.
*
The song was close enough to the 1969 Top Ten hit by Motown singer Edwin Starr, “25 Miles,” that Berns and Wexler were awarded coauthorship.
Jeff Barry, Bert Berns, Van Morrison, Janet Gauder, Carmine (“Wassel”) DeNoia
T
RUE TO HIS
word, Van Morrison returned to New York as soon as “Brown Eyed Girl” started up the charts in August. He sent for his eighteen-year-old girlfriend from California, Janet Gauder, a beautiful divorcee who brought her young son, Peter, and they all squeezed into a small room at the City Squire Hotel, across the street from Bang Records. All eight songs Morrison recorded in March had been assembled on an album, slapped into a cheesy package with phony psychedelic artwork, and titled
Blowin’ Your Mind!
Berns was a long way from
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, the new Beatles album.
Berns wrote the liner notes:
Van Morrison . . . turbulent . . . today . . . inside . . . a multicolored window through which one views at times himself and his counterself. Van Morrison . . . erratic and painful . . . whose music expresses the now! The right now of his own road, the ancient highway
.
And Van blows and Van sings and Van screams and Van listens and Van says “up them all” and becomes Van and what the hell that’s his friend and now he can live with himelf. He’s on the golden heels of success and his recordings are ubiquitous “baby please don’t go” from the down home weed country of the United States of Negro America. This LP is Van Morrison. We won’t explain it to you. With this one, go for yourself
.
He threw a cocktail reception for the album’s release on the Circle Line boat cruise around Manhattan. Some of his new friends mingled in the crowd with the regulation suits and ties from the Midtown music business. Wassel’s brother J.J. went around passing the hat for the United Jewish Appeal. Wassel took offense at the freakish ukulele player Tiny Tim with his long hair and effeminate manner as he tried to come aboard and Wassel dropped him overboard in the harbor. An impossibly young Van Morrison, backed by his new trio of New York musicians, just put together, delivered an earnest, vigorous set. He smiled happily after for photographs, drink in hand.
Berns hired guitarist Charlie Brown, who was a great player, not because he was a great player, but because he would make sure Morrison got to the dates on time. At his shows the following week at the Greenwich Village nightclub the Bottom Line, with members of the press and radio in the audience, Morrison went berserk during “T. B. Sheets,” thrashing around the tiny stage with his microphone stand. The female backup singers he hired for the dates had to duck. He ended up crashing into the drums, sprawling onstage, as the girl singers fled.
Moody, petulant Morrison spoke with such a thick accent he couldn’t make himself easily understood to anyone in New York, which only added to his general level of frustration and resentment. Trying to place a call through the hotel switchboard could take several tries because he would get so angry, he would have to hang up and calm down before he could start over. Morrison was not a social person. Berns dragged him out on his boat one sunny afternoon with his family, but Morrison was sullen, uncommunicative.
He didn’t have a lot of gigs, mostly local promotional events and radio interviews. He holed up in the City Squire with his girlfriend,
drinking heavily, taking in occasional shows by the blues greats who were his idols: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker. He didn’t understand someone like Berns, whose taste was tailored to the charts. Morrison had been surprised, talking to Berns about bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson. “He’s nothing,” said Berns. “In the States, people don’t even know who he is.”
Berns wanted Wassel to manage Morrison. Wassel found him foul-mouthed and unpleasant. He moved the Morrison party to less expensive quarters at the King Edward Hotel, where Wassel ran a poker game in the penthouse and professional wrestler Haystacks Calhoun lived across the hall. Wassel visited Morrison in his hotel room and found a drunken Morrison wearing a lamp shade, trailing window blinds from the hotel room, and singing “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am.” Wassel discovered a radio he had given Morrison was broken. When Wassel asked what happened, Morrison let loose a stream of profanity. Wassel reached for the nearest thing handy—Morrison’s acoustic guitar—and hit him over the head. The guitar was shattered. Wassel felt bad because it was a nice guitar, a Martin.
Even as the Aretha Franklin records Jerry Wexler was making pushed both Atlantic Records in specific and soul music in general further into the sunlight, he was still looking to sell the company and found some guys who might actually pull the trigger. Meanwhile, Wexler played Ellie Greenwich a rough mix of a new Aretha record and she immediately dreamed up a background vocal part on the spot that would tie the whole arrangement together to “Chain of Fools.” Wexler took her into the studio and Greenwich sang these
whoop-whoop
s that locked down the track on Franklin’s fifth consecutive Top Ten hit of the year. The hits just kept coming.
Eliot Hyman and Ray Stark started Seven Arts Productions in 1957, and while Stark produced movies for other studios all over Hollywood, Hyman stayed in New York consolidating other assets, such as buying the Warner Bros. film catalog and renting old movies to TV. They
took the company public in 1964 and, in January 1967, acquired old Jack Warner’s one-third interest in his film studio and record company for $32,000,000 and shortly thereafter purchased all the remaining outstanding stock. Hyman, who planned to sell Warner as soon as he could for a large profit, met with the Atlantic partners about a prospective purchase. Picking up undervalued companies and folding them into larger companies to make the combined companies more attractive to potential buyers—conglomerating—was very popular in the sixties. Hyman made Atlantic an offer.
Wexler hustled the Erteguns to and from the bargaining table. “This is the American dream,” he said. “Capital gains.” Ahmet Ertegun, living happily in his East Eighty-First Street townhouse, voted in favor of autonomy. His brother, Nesuhi, cast the deciding vote on the grounds of long-term survival. Few of the r&b independents Atlantic had started alongside were still standing. He did have mixed feelings, but he landed on the side of the sale.
There was only one problem. After years of cutting corners on costs, making records on the cheap, not paying royalties, and every other trick they could learn to put a few extra pennies in their pockets, the Atlantic partners apparently had no idea what their company was really worth on the market and drastically undervalued it. The price was surprisingly low. Hyman paid $4,500,000 in cash, $3,000,000 more in unsecured notes (IOUs), and the remainder of the $17,500,000 total in stock. Atlantic had $7,000,000 in cash, which became Hyman’s the minute the sale went through, so his total net cost was not more than $10,000,000, less than half in cash, roughly equal to the cash on hand.
On the first of October, late at night under fluorescent lights in an office in a tall building in Manhattan, they signed about a thousand documents and turned over all outstanding stock in Atlantic Records to Warner Bros.–Seven Arts. Under Hyman’s new W7 record division, they would merge with the existing Warner/Reprise labels. The creaky old Burbank film studio record label had undergone a
complete transformation in recent years under the skillful leadership of chairman Mo Ostin, former accountant to Reprise founder Frank Sinatra (who retained a substantial interest in the label even after the Warner–Seven Arts deal), and president Joe Smith, ex-Boston rock and roll disc jockey. In August, for the first time in the label’s history, Warner/Reprise had as many albums on the charts as industry leader Columbia—eighteen, including seven the label released that month. Although the labels were guaranteed autonomy under the terms of the acquisition, the combination was the beginning of conglomerating the entire independent record business.
In October 1967, Berns issued a new Neil Diamond single, “Kentucky Woman,” over Diamond’s objections. The singer wanted to release another song instead as his next single, a peculiar, offbeat number about a childhood imaginary friend named “Shilo.” Berns gave that all the consideration it deserved. Diamond’s last five singles went Top Twenty. He sold more than a million singles.
He was even moving a few albums, although his Bang albums were slapdash affairs.
The Feel of Neil Diamond
came out in the wake of “Cherry, Cherry” in August 1966 and featured his two big hits, “Solitary Man” and “Cherry, Cherry.” His second album,
Just for You
, came out in August the next year and also featured his two big hits, “Solitary Man” and “Cherry, Cherry.”
Berns ran his record company on his own strictly commercial instincts. They had something happening with Diamond—a kind of sulking, brooding sexuality that was going over big with teenage girls. “Kentucky Woman” would be the next single.
“Shilo” became a sore point with Diamond. Berns wanted hits and “Shilo” didn’t sound like a hit to him. Diamond had two meetings with Berns. They argued. Berns told him he would put out the song if Diamond signed a one-year extension on his contract. Diamond told him he didn’t want to give any more records to Bang. Berns also threatened Diamond. He said that it would be simple for the label to advance Van
Morrison’s career at the expense of Diamond’s in regards to promotion, advertising, the timing of releases, etc. Play ball, he warned Diamond.
Diamond didn’t. As president and 50 percent partner in Tallyrand Music, without consulting his partners, Diamond the partner decided not to pick up the production company’s option with Diamond the recording artist. He may have picked the fight with Berns, but he clearly didn’t mind rolling over Barry and Greenwich to get what he wanted.
His attorneys advised him that Berns was in breach of contract on several counts. There were minor breaches involving “coupling” or releasing Diamond tracks on albums featuring other people’s recordings, compilation albums such as
The Gang at Bang
, a collection of tracks by Bang acts. Also there was the matter of Diamond’s legal representation. The contracts were drawn up by Paul Marshall, who happened to represent all parties, Diamond, Barry and Greenwich, and Berns and Bang, not to mention Bang distributor, Atlantic Records, even though Diamond himself allowed that nobody had any doubts as to Marshall’s integrity.
But the key breach came from the omission—accidental according to Marshall, intentional said Diamond’s new attorneys—of the term “exclusive” in describing Diamond’s recording services in the contracts. Diamond’s attorneys assured him that would free him to sign a new record deal with another label as soon as a judge looked at the briefs.
Berns was settling into a comfortable working relationship at his new Forty-Second Street studio, Incredible Sounds, with engineer Chris Huston, a British expatriate stranded in this country when his rock group broke up, who had been working with such other clients at Incredible in only the past few months as James Brown and the Who. The Young Rascals recorded “Groovin’” at the Times Square studio. Huston had a good idea who Berns’s silent partners were and figured Wassel spent all that time hanging around the studio because he was keeping his eye on the business for those guys. He was leery, at first, but warmed up after Wassel took Huston to lunch at Jack Dempsey’s and gave him a guitar.
