Here Comes the Night (8 page)

Levy loved copyrights. They don’t talk back, he liked to say. When he first started his publishing company, he commissioned blind pianist George Shearing to write “Lullaby of Birdland,” named after the nightclub at Fifty-Second Street and Broadway that Levy operated, and the damn thing went on to become a standard, recorded a few hundred times.

Although he was only twenty-eight years old in 1955, Levy already had a colorful past. His father and a brother died when he was young, and after his other brother, Irving, joined the Navy, he grew up poor, living alone with his mother in the Bronx, running around the neighborhood since they were children with Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, fingered as the triggerman in the botched hit of mob boss Frank Costello in 1957. He dropped out of school in the sixth grade after assaulting a teacher. At age fourteen, working as a hatcheck boy at the Greenwich Village Inn, he came to know Thomas Eboli—called Tommy Ryan—an up-and-coming soldier in the Genovese family. At age sixteen, he went to work as a darkroom boy in the Ubangi Club, which was run by those guys. He wound up working his nightclub photography racket in a number of their clubs.

In 1945, after a year in the Navy, Morris, his brother Irving, disc jockey Symphony Sid, and nightclub impresario Monte Kay took over a fried chicken restaurant on Broadway and turned it into a jazz club. When they started booking bebop players such as Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon on Monday nights, lines snaked out the front door. The Royal Roost was a big success, but Levy got screwed by his partners and the club sold out from under him.

In December 1949, Levy and Kay bought Birdland—named after Charlie Parker, known to all as Bird—from mobster Joseph (Joe the Wop) Cataldo and turned the Fifty-Second Street basement into the headquarters of New York jazz—Dizzy, Bird, Miles, Monk, and all that. The full Count Basie Orchestra used to play three or four two-week stands every year, the sign outside the club reading simply BASIE’S BACK.

There was an unholy alliance between Morris Levy and George Goldner. A sharp guy who knew all the angles, Levy wasn’t a record man. He could wheel and deal, con and connive, but George Goldner had the magic touch. He could scrape a bunch of kids off the street, throw them in the studio with a raggedy-ass band, and come out with gold. What Levy had was money, which Goldner always badly needed, hardly surprising given that he could lose $50,000 in a day at the track. Wherever Goldner operated, Levy was never far away.

The five fellows in the Cleftones took the subway train down from Jamaica in Queens to Goldner’s office. In December 1955, their single “You Baby You” had been the first release on Goldner’s new label, Gee Records, named after his Crows hit. The group and their manager—a white friend from Jamaica High School who sang poorly and decided instead to take a backstage role—were surprised to find two rough-looking gentlemen in the office with Goldner, who wasn’t sitting at his desk. Instead, sitting at Goldner’s desk was a man who introduced himself as Morris Levy and told the group these other two menacing fellows were their new managers. Informed that they already had a manager, Levy took the young man they identified out in the hall.
When they returned, the Cleftones had new managers, Tommy Vastola and Johnny Roberts.

Gaetano “Tommy” Vastola had a number of nicknames—Corky, the Big Guy, the Galoot. He was a physically imposing man about Levy’s age who owned a nightclub in Coney Island near Nathan’s called the Riptide and ran with the Colombo gang. His uncle, Dominick Ciaffone, was known as Swats Mulligan, a big-time gangster with the Genovese family. Vastola was credited as coauthor of the Valentines’ hit “Lily Maebelle” and took a similar cowriting credit on “You Baby You.” In between loan sharking, grand larceny, and labor racketeering, Vastola liked to keep his hand in the music business. Johnny Roberts worked for him.

Morris Levy and Tommy Vastola did a lot of business together. With Levy a largely unseen power behind Goldner’s throne, he could hand off plums to his buddies like the Cleftones management or songwriting credits on Goldner productions (Vastola is doo-wop songwriting aristocracy, coauthor of the Wrens’ vocal group classic “Hey Girl,” the Valentines’ “I Love You Darling,” and another couple of dozen vintageera pieces). Levy had his hooks into Goldner but good. Levy owned a piece of Gee Records. He owned outright the publishing to Goldner’s biggest hit, the Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ 1956 Top Ten hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” He made more money off the record than Goldner did. Way more.

ALL THE NEW
York–based labels were well aware of a growing network of rhythm and blues disc jockeys with popular radio shows popping up in every city in the country. Especially well known to them was Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed, who, under the name Moondog, had been blasting their records on the airwaves since 1952. While underground currents were already streaming across the country, immutable forces no doubt already in motion, no one thing probably boosted the rock and roll revolt more than Alan Freed coming to New York City
radio. Certainly no single event so empowered the men of the rough-and-tumble world of the New York independent record business. In greedy, arrogant, drunken Alan Freed, the father of rock and roll, they found a willing coconspirator in their grandest plans and ambitions, whom they treated like the patsy he was.

Freed’s Cleveland radio show had already hit New York from Newark, New Jersey radio station WNJR beginning in December 1953, running taped copies of his original broadcasts with the local commercials clumsily hacked off. Freed, who presented what was undoubtedly the first rock and roll concert, Moondog’s Coronation Ball, in Cleveland in 1952 (the first rock and roll riot took place outside the same night), brought a similar rhythm and blues program to the Newark National Guard Armory in May 1954, featuring New York–based vocal group the Harptones, the Clovers, Muddy Waters, Charles Brown, and others. More than eleven thousand screaming teens mobbed the place. Thousands more were turned away.

“Hi, everybody,” said Freed, opening his debut nighttime airshift on New York’s WINS in September 1954. “This is your old Moondog here, with rhythm and blues records with the big beat in popular music in America today, for everyone out there in the Moondog kingdom.”

Freed hit the city like a fireball. In a minute, he was the town’s top deejay. Almost as quickly, he also found himself in court, losing a lawsuit to a blind street singer who wore a Viking costume and called himself Moondog. The court only awarded the singer chump change, but Freed also lost the right to use the Moondog name. Welcome to New York.

That night, drinking at his customary watering hole, P.J. Moriarty’s on Fifty-First Street, Freed dreamed up the cockamamie notion of copyrighting the term “rock and roll.” That way, Freed could protect his radio show’s new name,
Rock and Roll Party
, and extract tribute from interlopers violating his trademarked term. “Rock and roll” was rapidly gaining currency in the public tongue, replacing “rhythm and blues.”

Freed was introduced to Morris Levy by Jack Hooke, a small-time operator on the fringe of the music business who knew Freed from Cleveland and had been instrumental in his moving to New York. Levy filed a copyright notice for “rock and roll” on behalf of Seig Music, a corporation comprised of Levy, Freed, one of Freed’s Cleveland business partners, and radio station WINS. Freed pounded the phrase on the radio, insisted the station refer to him as a “rock and roll” disc jockey, and was a key instigator in spreading the term beyond the boundaries of any enforceable copyright. Within weeks, the phrase “rock and roll” became part of the national vocabulary. And the moneybags sprouted wings and flew away.

Freed’s fingerprints were all over the music business. He managed the vocal group the Moonglows and was credited as coauthor on their hit “Sincerely.” He was also given a writing share by Chess Records of the 1954 Chuck Berry hit “Maybellene.” He owned a piece of a Cleveland record distributorship. He made a pile throwing concerts in Cleveland and, with Levy’s backing, started doing concerts in New York. Levy, who produced a nationwide jazz tour, “Birdland Stars of 1955,” featuring Sarah Vaughan, Erroll Garner, Lester Young, George Shearing, and the Count Basie Orchestra, put up the dough and split the action with Freed, who pumped the concert on the radio.

The “Rock ’n’ Roll Jubilee Ball” sold out two shows at the six-thousand-seat St. Nicholas Arena, better known for boxing matches, featuring Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, Fats Domino, Joe Turner, the Clovers, Ruth Brown, and others in January 1955. An Easter week run at the much larger Brooklyn Paramount blew out the house record with a whopping $107,000 gross. Freed was big business.

Before long, he was living in splendor in a sixteen-room, half-century-old stucco mansion called Grey Cliffe on a two-acre grassy knoll on the Connecticut shore. Freed remodeled the guesthouse into a remote studio where he would do his nightly broadcasts. He bought the place for a princely $75,000 and had two mortgages, one held by
Jerry Blaine of Jubilee Records and the other by Morris Levy. Atlantic Records paid to build a swimming pool.

A lot of labels kept Freed on a monthly dole. Atlantic Records partner Jerry Wexler would take $600 cash in a paper bag every month and give it to Freed’s bagman in a cloakroom at the Brill Building. When Atlantic hit a terrifying cold streak, Wexler went to see Freed to ask if he could carry the label for a couple of months. “I’d love to, but I can’t do it,” Freed told Wexler. “That would be taking food out of my children’s mouths.”

Freed had no problem being a son of a bitch, but keeping him in line was his manager Tommy Vastola, most certainly put in place by Morris Levy. When Freed showed up bruised and battered at one point, it was widely assumed to be the result of a beating administered by Vastola, product of four reform schools. “This kid could tear another human being apart with his hands,” the FBI overheard his gangster uncle Dominick Ciaffone (Swats Mulligan) tell another boss.

What Alan Freed did in New York City, Dick Clark would take across the land. The Philadelphia after-school TV teen dance party host went nationwide on the ABC-TV network in August 1957. After a four-week trial run,
American Bandstand
was being carried by sixty affiliates and watched by millions of viewers. ABC-TV added the show to its permanent daytime schedule.

Freed and Clark were a study in contrasts. Sunny, squeaky-clean gentile Clark took over the local afternoon show in July 1956, after the original host was arrested for drunk driving. The twenty-six-year-old broadcaster quickly began to extend his tendrils into the music business. A grateful local label gave Clark a piece of the copyright to “Butterfly,” a hit by Philadelphia rock and roller Charlie Gracie, and introduced Clark to the publishing game. Gracie made twenty appearances on
Bandstand
before he sued his label for back royalties. He got a small settlement but never again appeared on
Bandstand
.

As with the New York independents and the Freed show, a thriving Philadelphia independent record scene, with ready access to the
national exposure
Bandstand
afforded, grew up around the show—Cameo-Parkway, Swan, Jamie—and Clark had a piece of them all. He didn’t play the Danny and the Juniors record “At the Hop” until he owned half the publishing. When he did, the record was an instant smash. Clark played “Sixteen Candles” by the Crests on the Coed label only four times in ten weeks. But after the publishing was assigned to January Music, another one of Clark’s pubberys, he slammed the side twenty-seven times in thirteen weeks.

With Freed and the rest of New York radio leading a nationwide surge, rock and roll was paying off big-time for the New York independents. Levy sabotaged Goldner’s Tico label when he advised his top record seller, Latin bandleader Tito Puente, to sign with RCA Victor in 1956 (where Puente would that year record his classic album
Dance Mania)
. Levy decided to enter the record business and took George Goldner as a partner, along with two other shady characters, Joe Kolsky, who had a piece of Goldner’s labels, and his brother Phil Kahl, who had been running Levy’s publishing. Together they started Roulette Records.

Right out of the box in January 1957, they hit it big. Picking up a local master out of some oil blotch in Texas, Roulette released both sides of the original single separately and scored two huge rock and roll hits—“Party Doll” by Buddy Knox, which went all the way to number one, and “I’m Sticking with You” by Jimmy Bowen. By April 1957, trade magazines noted that Goldner had left the label and also sold his interests in the Gee, Rama, and Tico labels to Levy, failing to mention that Goldner was paying off gambling losses and that he was, at age thirty-nine, practically washed up.

Down but never out after leaving Roulette, Goldner moved across the street and opened up Gone and End Records in 1650 Broadway. He had not lost his knack for finding hit acts. Five girls calling themselves the Chantels, who grew up singing together at St. Anthony of Padua School in the Bronx, all dressed alike and, after days of rehearsing
two songs written by lead vocalist Arlene Smith, went downtown and presented themselves at Goldner’s office because he produced Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. Although Goldner frequently auditioned groups who dropped by—there were often lines waiting in the hallway outside his door—he wasn’t there that day.

The girls shifted strategy and, a week later, stood outside the backstage door at the Brooklyn Paramount after one of the Alan Freed shows and performed an impromptu audition for the Valentines as they left the building. Richie Barrett immediately took the group under his wing and rehearsed them for weeks before presenting the group to Goldner. “He’s Gone,” the first Chantels release, did very well, and the second, the plaintive gospel call of “Maybe,” broke the Top Twenty in December 1957.

Barrett, one of the secrets of Goldner’s success, next brought Goldner a group called the Chesters, vocal group veterans with a single out on another New York independent. Goldner cut the group’s two originals and, not satisfied with either, gave the group a song by Alley veteran Al Lewis, whose old chestnut “Blueberry Hill” Fats Domino had revived to great effect the previous year. Lewis had a new song, “Tears on My Pillow,” that the group hated, but Goldner made them sing. After a handful of indifferent takes, Goldner told lead vocalist Anthony Gourdine to sing in the baby voice he used when he spoke. One of Goldner’s guys changed the group’s name to the Imperials and Alan Freed named the lead vocalist Little Anthony. The record was a Top Five hit on the End label in 1958.