Here Comes the Night (14 page)
“What’d I Say” was an elongated riff and series of nonsense couplets Ray and his Raelettes invented one night on the bandstand. It worked so well, they tried it again the next night, and the next, slowly polishing this gospel abstraction. When they rolled into Atlantic studios to record the piece in February 1959, it was more than seven minutes long and nobody knew what to do with it. After some judicious edits, Tom Dowd turned the piece into two heart-stopping three-minute cuts. A two-part minisuite for r&b orchestra and gospel quartet. This was something everybody knew what to do with. Wexler ordered the two-sided single held for release until summer when teens hit the
beaches with their transistor radios. The piece entered the literature as a bandstand standard almost as soon as it was released. “What’d I Say” single-handedly elevated the level of expression in the r&b idiom.
In May, Nesuhi Ertegun brought together the entire Count Basie band and seven key members of the Duke Ellington orchestra to back Ray Charles on big band sessions arranged by a young Quincy Jones (whom Charles had taught to write music as a teen in Seattle). These distinguished musicians were not sure if this twenty-seven-year-old blind piano player deserved all this; New York jazz cats with their typical attitudes about rhythm and blues. In the middle of running the score, Ray called Nesuhi over. “Fourth bar, third trumpet, there’s a bad note,” he said. Quincy didn’t hear it, so they had the trumpets play one by one. Third trumpet, fourth bar, wrong note. Transcriber wrote it down it wrong. The entire band broke into applause. Who had ears like that? The tone of the session suddenly changed, as Charles led the assembled multitude through a peerless romp of jazz standards, rhythm and blues, ballads and blues. They called the album
The Genius of Ray Charles
, and at Atlantic, that’s what they thought of him.
Atlantic was like a river in spring. Ahmet told the trades the label was forced to hold back spring releases because they were having so much success, he knew there wasn’t room for that much Atlantic product on radio station playlists. By summer, the company was billing $1 million a month in sales. And the best was yet to come.
Bobby Darin hated rock and roll. “I sing rock and roll because it sells records,” he told
Billboard
in September 1958. “The young kids like it and want it and I can do it. But I try to be versatile. It’s the only way to build a future in this business. In the nightclubs, I lean to other things, ballads done fairly straight, special bits, etc. I even do ‘Mack the Knife’ from
Threepenny Opera
.”
He and Ahmet went into the studio in December 1958 and cut an album’s worth of big band pop, including Darin’s swaggering version of the Kurt Weill–Bertolt Brecht song that had recently been reprised
by Louis Armstrong. Ahmet used an arranger he found through Darin’s publicist and always claimed that he knew “Mack the Knife” was a hit on the first run-through in the studio. But the label proved to be in no hurry to release this decidedly adult fare from their resident teen idol. The album,
That’s All
, came out in March 1959. The next month, the company released a new single from sessions Ahmet conducted in March, “Dream Lover,” more teen beat pop romance, although a slightly larger session than on his previous outings. The label didn’t even release a single of “Mack the Knife” until August, by which time demand had already built up.
The record was the best-selling record of the year in 1959 and, again, the best-selling record of 1960. Even more unimaginable, at the second annual Grammy Awards in November 1959, “Mack the Knife” won Record of the Year—over Sinatra and Presley—and Darin himself was named Best New Artist, the first year that award was given. “Mack the Knife” is often seen as an anti–rock and roll statement, a blow by reactionary forces that sided with the Sinatra/Mitch Miller viewpoint on rock and roll as garbage for kids, but what “Mack the Knife” really turned out to be was an anomalous, final hit from the swing era, the last time the big band sound would top the charts. It was a record they understood around the Broadway music offices. Between “Mack the Knife” and “What’d I Say,” the dominion of Atlantic ranged far and wide.
*
Atlantic made a $25,000 offer to sign Elvis—that was all the label could afford—but Colonel Parker held out for a $40,000 guarantee from RCA Victor, the largest advance ever given any recording artist at that point.
Russell Byrd on
The Clay Cole Show
B
OBBY MELLIN WAS
a stout, short man in his fifties who dyed his gray hair. When Berns joined his firm in 1960, Mellin was running his publishing empire from his Knightsbridge district office in London, while his posh second wife lived in a five-hundred-year-old manor in the Surrey countryside, where he joined her for weekends. The great Gus Kahn had shown the kid the ropes. The ubiquitous Chicago lyricist of the twenties (“Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” “Makin’ Whoopee”) took a shine to young Bobby Mellin, a Russian Jew immigrant kid working behind the counter at a music publisher, and took him on the road with him for several years.
Mellin was never much of a songwriter. He paid someone to ghostwrite lyrics to his big standard, “My One and Only Love,” one of the first songs Frank Sinatra recorded with arranger Nelson Riddle on his comeback swing for Capitol Records in 1953. It was a rewrite anyway of an existing number called “Music from Beyond the Moon” that Mellin—or someone on his behalf—simply fitted with new lyrics. Mellin’s biggest hit, “You You You” by the Ames Brothers, one of the most unbearably puerile songs of its day, was simply his English lyrics to a German pop song. Mellin turned suiting English lyrics to foreign language songs into his specialty as a songwriter.
As a music publisher, Mellin made his money off songwriters and kept offices in both London and New York. He was a tuberculosis carrier, so he had difficulty entering the United States and rarely showed up on these shores. Russ Miller managed the office on the sixth floor of 1650 Broadway, next door to where Berns, Ray Passman, and Herb Wasserman ran their music business hustle. When Miller offered him the $50-a-week song plugger job in early 1960, Berns sold his desk and file cabinet to Herbie, who closed the office shortly thereafter.
Like all the old-line publishers, Mellin was afraid of rock and roll, and Miller sensed in Berns someone who could bring the office up to date. Mellin approved, but he was a remote presence in the small office suite above Broadway. At the time, rock and roll’s future seemed uncertain. Folk music was the latest threat on the horizon. The Kingston Trio was selling albums by the truckload. Anything seemed possible. Music publishers like Mellin, their catalogs mired in post–swing era glossy pop songs that suddenly sounded very old-fashioned, had no idea what was happening. At age thirty-one, Berns hardly qualified as a teenager, but he had fresh, hungry ears.
Starting out in the music business, Berns spent the first year looking for his voice. His initial efforts were gimmicky and pedestrian, but he managed to get songs recorded. Berns was a man with ideas. He sold Gene Schwartz at Laurie Records his “The Ballad of Walter Williams,” a song commemorating the recent death of the last Civil War soldier, which Schwartz cut with a rockabilly singer named Jack Carroll. Berns and Russ Miller wrote “White Oak Swamp,” more sentimental claptrap about a Civil War battle, for a single by one Johnny Yukon on the Versatile label. Berns now had a new songwriting name—his first two names, Bert Russell.
With the release of the epic John Wayne motion picture looming—and Berns still laboring under the impression that American history was a hot topic for the hit parade—Bert Berns made his debut as a recording artist with “The Legend of the Alamo” in October 1960 on
a Laurie Records single destined for obscurity. With banjos strumming, martial choirs singing along on the choruses, lyrics half-recited, half-sung, Berns no doubt meant to strike a patriotic chord, but this was no “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Berns shared the writing with Bobby Mellin and another recent Mellin songwriting signing, a young rockabilly singer from Texas named Bob Johnston. (Years later, as staff producer at Columbia Records, Johnston would oversee hit albums by Johnny Cash, Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan.)
On the flip side, Berns sang the folky “Gotta Travel On,” which country singer Billy Grammer made a Top Ten hit the previous year, covering a song that had been “written”—well copyrighted—by Greenwich Village folk song discoverer Paul Clayton, who based his song on a nearly identical piece of mountain music long in the public domain. Buddy Holly used the song to open his shows the year before on his fatal “Winter Dance Party” tour.
Cashbox
liked both sides. “A lively folkish stand which takes very good advantage of the upcoming ‘Alamo’ flick,” noted the trade magazine. “Deft folk-beat sound.”
Berns had found a sympathetic ear in Gene Schwartz at Laurie Records, but Schwartz was a solid square who was just learning the business himself. He and his brother Bob Schwartz were accountants who thought the record business would be fun. They looked the part; horn-rim glasses, crew cuts, and bow ties. Their partner, Allen Sissel, had put up the money and they cut in Gene’s best friend, Eliot Greenberg, who happened to be an arranger and musician, making him useful in the actual making of the records.
The label struck gold on the first release in 1958, “I Wonder Why,” a volcanic epiphany of white doo-wop and Bronx soul by Dion and the Belmonts that the Schwartzes had stumbled over. By 1960, when the group broke through to a widespread audience with a straight-faced cover of the Jerome Kern standard, “Where or When,” Dion and the Belmonts were certified rock and roll stars. Of course, the lead vocalist and the group went their separate ways later that year, and Dion was
considering different options to pursue as a solo act when he ran into Berns walking down Broadway. Berns pulled him over to the curb and, pounding on the fender of a parked car, gave Dion an impromptu song demonstration. Dion couldn’t help but like the guy.
The first demos Berns cut for Mellin Music were not a distinguished lot. He tried out some pseudofolk (“Sally”), morbid country and western (“(I’m Gonna Carve Your Name on) Cold Prison Walls”), and another jailhouse ballad (“I’m Coming Back”), a trifling whistling novelty feature that actually was recorded as “Whistler’s Twist” by someone named Elson Smith. “The World Is Mine” was intriguing—a sultry Cubano vamp banged out on piano. Also there was the rocking bare bones of a song titled “In a Room In a House,” Berns shouting out the lyrics over his pounding piano and a buzzing electric guitar. The song is a stark, almost metaphorical lament for a life without love. He gave the song to Dion, who cut a big band version in a kind of Bobby Darin–style experimental session after splitting with the Belmonts. Dion sounded ballsy and bluesey in front of the blasting brass, but Gene Schwartz decided to stick with the teen scene for Dion and the track was shelved.
But Berns did land a record with Schwartz on a song titled “Push Push” with a singer named Austin Taylor. The record moved on an insistent bass and supple rhythmic groove straight out of the mambo. Cowritten with Phil Medley, an older black gentleman who worked down the hall at Roosevelt Music and also wrote the current Jimmy Charles hit, “A Million To One,” the song itself was more frankly sexual than standard chart fare of the day with its repeated chorus, “Push, push . . . you’ve got to give a love a shove.”
Schwartz customarily made indifferent, unexciting recordings that depended on the vocal performance and the song for everything. With Berns in the studio kibitzing, the Caribbean undercurrent of the arrangement is clearly Berns insinuating himself into the record. The entire production sounds considerably more animated and lively than Schwartz’s usual job, whipped up by some of Berns’s enthusiasm.
Little noticed at the time, “Push Push” spent two entire weeks on the
Billboard Hot 100
in November 1960 and reached as high as ninety. It may have been only a modest beginning, but Berns was on the charts.