Here Comes the Night (9 page)
Goldner was not musical in any practical way, but he knew what a record should sound like. By using the same basic group of musicians, Goldner had a sound he could trust, and he knocked out records by the dozens. He became a master of studio technology, such as it was, and his 1959 record with the Flamingos, his brilliant, shimmering “I Only Have Eyes for You,” used the new electronic echo with as much as three seconds’ delay. The vocals break the surface of the sound like
the reflection of the moon rippling across a lake. The harmonies sound as if they are being piped in from some other planet. Lead vocalist Nate Nelson gives a flawless performance of the Harry Warren standard, and the record stands as one of the greatest achievements in the field, the acme of the entire era.
While most disc jockeys who took cash from the labels at least gave the records a spin for the money, Dick Clark conducted business from such regal heights, payola was paid him as a tribute, offered up so that he might even deign to pay attention. Cash was not enough. Even handing over the publishing might not be enough. A man like Goldner had to give up almost everything just so Dick Clark would think about helping him. This was a tough racket and nobody extracted their pound of flesh from the guys with any greater relish than Dick Clark.
When the payola scandal hit in late 1959, hot on the heels of quiz show champion Charles Van Doren testifying before the same congressional committee about rigging the TV show
Twenty-One
, Goldner, Freed, Clark, and all the others were dragged through the witness chair. With an election year looming and rock and roll blamed as one of the great social ills of the day, these congressmen bent to the task of cleaning up this cesspool of corruption, even though the practice of payola wasn’t, strictly speaking, illegal.
Freed, who switched from WINS to WABC in 1958, refused to sign a statement saying he never accepted payola until he saw one signed by Dick Clark, who worked for the same corporation. WABC fired Freed. Although Levy warned Freed to keep quiet, he shot off his mouth in a quarrelsome, contentious interview with columnist Earl Wilson and the headlines on the
New York Post
front page were the same size as V-J Day (“Alan Freed Telling All”). Levy phoned Freed. “What the fuck did you do?” he said.
Dick Clark’s labyrinthian holdings in the music business were so complex, committee investigators needed to prepare charts for the committee to lay out all seventeen different corporations Clark owned
and the more than eighty different individuals with singular business associations with him. He even owned a record pressing plant. Of course, Clark had divested himself of all his music business interests by the time he appeared before the committee. But he was too valuable a property to ABC. He would keep his job. Clark was going to weather the same storm that sunk Freed.
A chastened, dour Goldner faced the congressmen, seated by his lawyer, and ratted out Clark to the subcommittee. He tried to explain himself (“I’m a traveling man and a recording man. I spend fourteen or fifteen hours rehearsing, recording, and traveling quite a bit . . . ”). He described in detail how he transferred title to Clark’s publishing companies to four copyrights (including the 1958 Top Twenty-Five hit “Could This Be Magic” by the Dubs) through Vera Hode, a former Morris Levy employee who was still working in Goldner’s 1650 Broadway office when she went to work for Clark.
Mr. Lishman: “What benefit would you get out of this?”
Mr. Goldner: “Hoping that he would play my records.”
Mr. Lishman: “And the only profit you would make would be on the sale of records?”
Mr. Goldner: “Yes, sir; that would be my profit.”
Mr. Lishman: “You wouldn’t receive anything at all, either from mechanical royalties—”
Mr. Goldner: “Not anything from the publishing end of the tunes.”
Mr. Lishman: “Nothing.”
Mr. Goldner: “Nothing.”
Mr. Lishman: “The only profit you could expect would be from the sale of the records.”
Mr. Goldner: “Yes, sir.”
Mr. Lishman: “Did Dick Clark play all these songs on his show, the
American Bandstand
and the
Dick Clark Show
?”
Mr. Goldner: “I think three of the four were played; I don’t think ‘Beside My Love’ was played.”
Mr. Lishman: “And what happened to the three that were played? Did they—”
Mr. Goldner: “‘Could This Be Magic’ was a chart record; ‘Every Night I Pray’ was a chart record; ‘So Much’ was a chart record, too; three records hit the top 100 charts.”
Mr. Lishman: “Did they hit the top before Dick Clark started plugging them?”
Mr. Goldner: “I don’t think so.”
*
Saxophonist Wright began his career in the late thirties playing around Harlem clubs in a trio with another young musician just starting out, pianist Thelonious Monk.
Berns at the piano
I
RVING BERLIN WOULD
often find himself trapped in the elevator with these horrid young rock and rollers. He would scowl and look away as he went to his seventh-floor office. The sleazy songswipers of his own age were bad enough, but these hotshots, barely older than the teenagers who bought their songs, had found entirely new ways to be uncouth.
The twelve-story building at 1650 Broadway on the corner of West Fifty-First Street housed plenty of music business offices. A few were even distinguished tenants, like Berlin, the man who wrote “There’s No Business like Show Business,” “White Christmas,” and “God Bless America.” “St. Louis Blues” composer W.C. Handy also kept his office in the building. But, for the most part, 1650 was rock and roll.
There was nothing especially noteworthy about the building at a glance. A drugstore held down the corner on Broadway. The office building entrance was around the corner on Fifty-First Street, large chrome numerals “1650” above a revolving door. But nothing less than a tumultuous revolution was going on inside. From within these walls, insurgents were mounting an assault on the New York music business, an elite, time-honored industry established before the turn of the century.
In the four years since rock and roll first struck a chord in the national breast, this awful scourge had shown no signs whatsoever of crawling back into whatever gutter it came from in the first place. The haggard, jaundiced music business professionals had seen passing fancies come and go time and again over the years, but this earsore just kept coming, like some untoward swarm of insects sweeping out of the cracks in the sidewalk. To these old hands, rock and roll sounded like musical illiteracy, the undignified, untutored keenings of woebegone Negroes, hicks, and juvenile delinquents.
The major labels had lost control of the hit parade. In four years, the big labels—Columbia, RCA Victor, Decca—had gone from having four-fifths of the Top Ten hits to less than a third. The maverick independents with their rock and roll records had taken half the marketplace away from the big companies. But even more seriously, the old-line publishing companies were out of the picture. Only twenty years earlier, a mere twenty-two publishers, every single one based in New York City, owned the Top Ten. In 1959, sixty-nine publishers from eight states shared the take. What’s more, only two of the publishers who had Top Ten records in 1939 lofted new entries in the Top Ten twenty years later.
These publishers suddenly out in the cold were not small potatoes, but esteemed Broadway institutions, some nearing a hundred years old. The unthinkable had occurred. The palace gates were open. The infidels were feasting at the table.
Upstairs at 1650 Broadway, Don Kirshner and his partner Al Nevins were running a tidy little success of a music publishing firm, Aldon Music, chiefly off two writers—Neil Sedaka and Bobby Darin, who were both starting to sell records under their own names. Sedaka started cutting his own songs at RCA Victor after Connie Francis took his “Stupid Cupid” Top Twenty in 1958. After many failed attempts, Bobby Darin finally landed on the hit parade in 1958 with “Splish Splash,” a kind of calculated dance hit featuring characters from other
rock and roll songs. Darin was so intensely neurotic about his success in the record business that he developed a savage case of psoriasis that disappeared the week his single hit the charts.
Mambo man George Goldner headed up several independent labels out of his offices in the building. He had long before abandoned the mambo in favor of rhythm and blues and rock and roll and kept losing everything he made at the racetrack. But he was still finding acts and turning out hits. Dick Clark of TV’s
American Bandstand
maintained an office in the building for his Sea-Lark (C-Lark, get it?) Enterprises, a publishing company made rich by gifts of copyrights from record men seeking favor from the
Bandstand
broadcaster. Clark, the single most powerful disc jockey in the country, was way beyond the simple $50 handshake adequate for his less exalted colleagues. Instead of simple payola, Clark got royola, the gift that keeps on giving.
On another floor, songwriter and music publisher Aaron Schroeder was having a great year. He landed a couple of key Elvis Presley B-sides—“Anyway You Want Me” on the back of “Love Me Tender” and “I Was the One” behind “Heartbreak Hotel”—in the crucial year of 1956 when everything Presley sang sold by the millions. But this year, in 1959, not only did he have new singles by Presley (“A Big Hunk o’ Love”) and Sinatra (“French Foreign Legion”), but he also had records with Pat Boone, Cathy Carr, the Kalin Twins, Annette Funicello, and Conway Twitty. The royalty checks all came addressed to 1650 Broadway.
With the established forces in popular music unable to relate to this shift in popular taste, the game was up for grabs. People selling records out of car trunks only a few years before were emperors of the charts. Singers nobody ever heard of, singing songs by writers nobody knew, were outselling the bluest of the blue chips. Anybody who could sound like he knew what was going on could get a shot. Any shot could score. It was a field day for hucksters and con men, a breed always crowding the edges of show business on Broadway. It was also an opportunity
for ambition, good luck, and even talent to pay off. Every day people heard tell at eateries along the strip like Jack Dempsey’s or the Turf about the latest amateur songwriter riding the top of the
Billboard Hot 100
. Sooner, not later, anyone with thoughts along those lines found their way to 1650 Broadway.
Bert Berns was always a talker. With his lopsided grin and the eyes with the conspiratorial glint, he could be a smooth salesman. Every hustler needed a gift of gab and Berns came well supplied. Ed Feldman was an older, overweight, bald Jewish guy, a
schlub
who made a bundle in the building trades, but always had a yen to be in show business. Berns convinced him to pony up $10,000—big bucks—to start a record label. With Feldman’s money in his pocket, Berns ran across the drummer he knew from the Eydie Gorme record, Herb Wasserman, who had a couple of songs and was thinking about branching out himself. With a friend of Wasserman’s named Ray Passman, another comer songwriter, the three of them decided to take a sixth-floor office.
In some respects, he couldn’t have found less likely business partners, since both Wasserman and Passman were professional jazzbeaux who looked down their noses at rock and roll. Only a couple of years older than Berns, Passman was a hipster and scenemaker who caught the bebop bug as a youth in Manhattan during the forties. He clerked at Broadway Music Store and followed Charlie Parker around town, eventually landing a job as a counter boy at George Paxton Music in 1951. Meanwhile he worked at writing songs. It took him five years, but he had his brush with success. Copping a melody from an old children’s song, he came up with enough of a tune to attract the attention of seasoned Tin Pan Alley hand Sunny Skylar, best known for writing “Besame Mucho.” Using his brother-in-law’s name on the songwriting credit he now shared with Passman, Skylar got “I’m Gonna Love You” to the Ames Brothers, whose 1956 single of the song nicked the bottom of the charts for a couple of weeks. That was long enough to get Passman out from behind the counter, two thousand bucks in his kip.
