Here Comes the Night (11 page)

Greenwich Village in the late fifties was a burbling cauldron of social unrest and creative ferment. The goatee and leotard set were digging poetry, cool jazz, and folk music in the cafes and bars that dotted the avenues and side streets. Thelonious Monk played the Village Vanguard, a tiny cellar on Seventh Avenue. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were reading poetry in coffeehouses. “Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio hit the top of the charts in October 1958 and the smell of cappuccino leaked out onto MacDougal Street from the Commons, the Gaslight, the Cafe Wha?, the Folklore Center, and elsewhere. Camus and Sartre were literary watchwords. Self-styled sick comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl made fun of the conformists.
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen coined the term for these disaffected youth, beatniks, and they wore it proudly. Like crazy, man, crazy. But the Village had long been a stronghold of bohemianism. Years before, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas drank himself to death on a corner stool at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in the West Village, just around the corner from where Bert and Rita lived.

Although he may have worn a beard, Bert was not himself a beatnik. He did look close enough to pass for one on a TV program. His father called him a bum. He sat around their apartment, listened to albums of bullfight music, and constantly strummed his guitar, a nylon-stringed Goya that he likely mistook for an authentic Spanish guitar with that genuine Cuban
guajiro
sound. Most people did. The inexpensive guitar was actually manufactured by the Swedish company Hagström, better known for accordions, a confusion they undoubtedly intended when they named the guitar model the Goya. Flamenco guitar was very popular and it wasn’t going to hurt sales to have people think it was Spanish.

Bert didn’t have many clothes and never wore a necktie. He did comb his hair scrupulously, carefully trying to disguise the receding hairline. Sometimes he simply clunked a tweed hat on his head and didn’t take it off. He played piano and guitar and listened to Cuban
records for hours. He didn’t bathe often and when Rita bitched about that, he told her he had a rheumatic heart and the doctors told him to avoid the shock of the water. She never believed that malarkey about his heart. The guy was too good-natured and happy-go-lucky to be facing death.

He was fascinated with bullfights, something that must have appeared extravagantly exotic to a kid from the Bronx. He pecked away at a novel, a gritty urban coming-of-age story about a young classical pianist and his conflicts with his father. He wrote short scripts and talked big about dreams of success, travel to Europe, the good life up ahead. Rita brought in some money playing club dates and Bert would run up to the Bronx every so often to have his mother slip him some more dough. He still owned a junky car, although he would occasionally borrow his mother’s white Thunderbird, and he could always hustle up a dollar for gas somewhere. The couple would often grab a spaghetti dinner at Luigi’s, where two people could eat and drink a glass of wine for five bucks. He was scuffling, although he was careful to keep telling Rita how great everything was going to be.

He was always on the lookout for a score, a quick knockdown like this dunce Ed Feldman, the investor. Once Bert, Passman, and Wasserman set up shop at 1650, they let Feldman answer the phones. After all, he wanted to be in show business. They arranged the office with Herb and Ray stationed in the front room and Bert holding down the back room, all their names on the door. Herb talked his girlfriend, Joan Wile, into playing secretary, although she was more showgirl than typist, even if she had graduated from college. Berns knew the first thing he had to do with Feldman’s money—put out a record with Rita. He selected a piece of material from the hit second album by Harry Belafonte, “Troubles,” a cool, finger-snapping blues written by Belafonte himself.

The New York–born, Jamaica-raised vocalist Belafonte was a pop phenomenon at the time along the lines of Elvis himself. He abandoned
a career as a conventional nightclub pop vocalist to sing folk and was drawn to the calypso songs he heard growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, where he spent eight years as a boy with his Jamaican mother. In 1951, he introduced his new act at the Village Vanguard and slowly began to build acceptance for his mixture of traditional American folk and Caribbean calypso. With the explosive success of “The Banana Boat Song” in 1957, Belafonte graduated to phenomenon status, as many pop prognosticators predicted calypso would wipe the upstart rock and roll off the map that first year after Elvis. Such was not to be the case, but Belafonte did hold down center stage in the pop panorama for a moment. The selection of his urbane blues for Rita’s record seemed calculated to bridge the gulf between her jazzy inclinations and the pop appetite of the public. They pressed up a few hundred copies on the Performance label, a big treble clef next to the name on the label.

This was a common routine for the hustlers of 1650, press up a handful of records under some insignia, send them around to radio stations, and see if something starts happening somewhere. If a record caught fire, say, in Pittsburgh, it was easy to cut a deal with another more legit record company a rung or two up the ladder. Deals like this took place every day. Of course, for every deal that happened, there were another ninety-nine that didn’t.

But Bert, flush with Feldman’s money, didn’t leave it there. He grabbed Rita and took her and a pile of records down to Florida to visit some radio stations where the sun was shining. Nice trip, but no soap. Rita’s record sank like a stone in a lake.

Bert had bigger plans for the next outing. He teamed with a big teddy bear of a singer who called himself Bill Giant, although his name was Ethan Goldstein. He was a hardworking family man with a sweet voice and designs as a songwriter. He sang some jingles and fronted a club band that did weddings, bar mitzvahs, what have you. With a friend of his who called herself Anna Shaw, an old Tin Pan Alley hand
who specialized in Spanish songs, Giant fashioned a corny tribute to the disaffected youth of Greenwich Village. Bert saw a possible quick buck in the idea. Downstairs at the recording studio in the 1650 basement, Allegro Studio, Bert and Bill put their voices together on the choruses, while Bill handled the lead on the verses to the song “Beat Generation.” They called themselves the Beatniks.

The similarity with the jokey rhythm and blues records songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were making with the Coasters was only enhanced by the presence of saxophonist King Curtis on the track (Herb Wasserman handled the drums). But the record fell considerably short of the sly parody and social commentary of the Leiber-Stoller songs for the Coasters. The Beatniks were patently a one-shot novelty offering and, even as such, not all that noteworthy. Even Edd (Kookie) Byrnes of TV’s
77 Sunset Strip
sounded more authentic on his beatnik parody record. But Berns was savvy enough to keep the publishing for both “Beat Generation” and the flip side.

If that idea wasn’t goofy enough, Bill Giant’s next one was even better. He wanted to do a rock and roll version of the Gettysburg Address. Giant was sure this would be the big breakthrough. American history was hot on the hit parade at the moment with Johnny Horton taking “The Battle of New Orleans” to the top of the charts. With a little rat-ta-tat martial drumming mixed in behind the rock and roll beat, these two wacky guys half sang, half recited “Four score and seven years ago . . . ” They even managed to convince Bob Thiele, a big shot at Decca Records who had resurrected his old Signature label, to put the thing out.

Thiele might have known better. He was a record producer who had started a label as a teenager living in Forest Hills, recording classic jazz by veterans such as Coleman Hawkins and James P. Johnson. He folded the company in the midfifties when he went to Decca, where he hit it big with a string of square pop hits by Teresa Brewer, the McGuire Sisters, and Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy.” He started to dabble in rock
and roll, signing Buddy Holly and Jackie Wilson. He resurrected his Signature label in 1959 with records by TV host Steve Allen, but even Thiele, hot as he was, didn’t have a clue.

In short order, Thiele pumped out records on his label aimed at the pop field from every imaginable direction. Among the more than two dozen records he released that year were numbers by Lawrence Welk’s musical director George Cates (with whom Thiele had a huge 1956 hit for Decca on “Moonglow and the Theme from ‘Picnic’”), Steve Allen and his wife Jayne Meadows, r&b singer Jimmy Ricks of the Ravens, monologist Eddie (“The Old Philosopher”) Lawrence, and rock and roller Arch Hall Jr., whose storied B-movie career was preceded by “Monkey in My Hatband” on Signature. Thiele hadn’t found the mark with any of the singles he put out on Signature the first year back in business. “The Gettysburg Address” by Bert and Bill Giant was no exception, just another idiotic crack at breaking into the hit single field that went nowhere, cooked up at 1650 Broadway.
*

The place was crummy with characters. Mickey Lee Lane was born Sholom Schreiber, an eighteen-year-old kid with
chutzpah
who wandered the halls of 1650, knocking on doors. Berns liked the little motor-mouth Jew rock and roller whose father was a cantor and traveling salesman. Rock and roll crazy, Lane used to take the train from Long Island with his sister Shonnie into Manhattan and dance on the Alan Freed rock and roll TV show. Tired of the home recordings he made on his father’s Webcor tape deck, he pawned his elaborate electric train set to pay for a full-fledged session downtown. He and his sister released a single, “Toasted Love,” on the Brunswick subsidiary of Decca in 1958, and Lane had been haunting the hallways of Broadway music business office buildings ever since, when he wandered into Berns’s lair and played him some of his home recordings.

Lane hung out at Berns’s office every time he came to the city. He played piano on demo sessions for Berns. Sometimes he supplied handclaps and sometimes he just watched. He wound up writing a song called “Don’t Stop” with Bert and Ray Passman, which Passman published, although the song was never recorded. They did make a demo of Lane’s own “All I Want to Do Is Dance,” and when Lane showed Bert another song he had written, Bert switched a few lines around, tossed off a couple of new lyrics, and added his name as cowriter to the song, “I Want to Be Loved,” not that there was any stampede to record that either.

Ersel Hickey, another Broadway character whom Berns wrote a couple of songs with, was somewhat better known. His 1959 hit “Bluebirds over the Mountain” may not have climbed that far up the national charts, but New York radio treated it like a number one smash. Hickey kept an office a couple of blocks down the street in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, the big music business office building at West Forty-Ninth Street and Broadway.

The twenty-five-year-old rocker came from upstate New York, near Rochester, where a photographer took a crackerjack shot of Hickey, leg cocked sideways, his guitar pointing ahead like a lance, and put him in touch with Mike Corda, a sometime songwriter and personal manager who handled Italian pop singer Enzo Stuarti. They cut a demo version of “Bluebirds” that wobbled along on a quirky, awkward rhythm and lasted only a minute and a half. But they knew they had something special, something that in its own tiny way was perfect. They leased the master to Epic Records, where Corda had previously placed Stuarti.

In 1958, however, the stripped-down rock and roll sound was on the way out, and although “Bluebirds” struggled up the charts, fighting its way to number seventy-five, it was a battle to go that far. Hickey was in the hands of New York–based major label executives, not Memphis good ole boys who might have understood his down-to-earth rock and
roll sound better. By the time Hickey was set to record his third single for the label, a subsidiary of stodgy Columbia Records, he was given the choice of two songs written by Alley old-timer Al Lewis, who cowrote “Blueberry Hill” in 1940. Lewis had also recently scored with “Tears on My Pillow” by Little Anthony and the Imperials and formed a publishing venture with up-and-coming music publisher Don Kirshner. Both demos were sung by Kirshner’s songwriting partner, Bobby Darin. Hickey picked “You Never Can Tell” and went nowhere. Fats Domino, who had done so well with his version of “Blueberry Hill,” took “I’m Ready” and sailed into the Top Twenty.

Like Lane, Hickey wrote a couple of songs with Berns that did nothing. But Berns loved knowing Ersel. A jubilant Berns burst into Hickey’s Brill Building office one morning, waving the album just released by Mexican American rocker Ritchie Valens, who had died that February 1959 in the same plane crash that killed the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly. The Valens hit “La Bamba,” with its familiar C-F-G-F progression rooted deeply in the Latin sound that fascinated Berns, was his current favorite song. “Look,” he told Hickey, “you’re right next to ‘La Bamba.’” And, yes, Valens’s version of “Bluebirds” was the second cut on the album, immediately following “La Bamba.”

But Berns was getting nowhere. He ran through Ed Feldman’s money. His girlfriend grew tired of his mouthful of promises. When they were threatened with eviction, his cousin Burt Gordon, by now a practicing attorney in Manhattan, made a couple of convincing phone calls to stall the landlord. But when the rent was still not forthcoming, Rita and Bert went sneaking out in the middle of the night from the dump with the fake fireplace and the kitchen in the hallway, carrying what few possessions they had. For Rita, it was the end. Exasperated at his endless stream of schemes and plans for the future, she no longer believed Bert. She never really liked his music, another jazz snob looking down her nose at rock and roll. She decided he would never make it and split for Florida without him.

Bert was disconsolate. He pleaded his case over the long-distance wires, promising changes, asking her to marry him. But Rita stayed in Florida. Losing his girlfriend and the apartment was one thing, but he also couldn’t pay the rent on his office at 1650. Herbie Wasserman liked Bert—everybody did—but he also thought he was a semitalented know-nothing who was never going to amount to anything. But then Wasserman also thought of rock and roll as children’s music. He wasn’t above putting something together called “Rebel Yell” with trumpet and tympani and grown men going “Whoop! Whoop!” He would do that (and even managed to sell it to a label), but he didn’t have to like it. Berns actually liked the stuff.