Here Comes the Night (16 page)

Jimmy Jones had one of the hottest records of the previous year with “Handy Man,” and the follow-up, “Good Timin’,” hadn’t done too badly either. But he was already two stiff singles beyond that when Berns took him in the studio. Jones was a savvy old hand at the game. He recorded for Herman Lubinsky’s Savoy Records with the Sparks of Rhythm in 1954 and spent a couple of years making records for George Goldner. He did some things with Bobby Robinson up in Harlem and produced a couple of groups on his own. He had made about twenty-five records when he cut “Handy Man,” a record that took almost a year to break.

Jones had seen his songs come back from the pressing plant with new coauthors on the label. He knew the game and he liked Berns—he related to people. Berns gave him a song, “I Say Love,” that came wrapped in an explosive Cuban big band sound straight off the dance floor of the Tropicana. The record burst open with a salvo of brass and drums, driven by a jungle beat straight out of Beny Moré and Havana in the fifties, a confident, commanding production unlike anything Berns had done. He was quickly finding his way in the studio.

He wasn’t credited as producer again, but Berns is all over “A Little Bit of Soap” by the Jarmels, his first real hit, a song written solely by
Berns as Bert Russell, that peaked at number twelve on the
Billboard
charts in September 1961, after eight weeks on the way up. He played the song on guitar for the five fellows who were going to sing it at the Laurie Records offices and they practiced it in the subway on their way back to the hotel.

The five young men hailed from Richmond, Virginia, where their vocal group first attracted the attention of blues singer B.B. King, who recommended the college students to a New York agent and a record deal. The record company named the group after a street in Harlem. The first record went nowhere. At the May 1961 session for the second single, Berns stood beside the Schwartz brothers in the control room. The group did something like twelve takes. The record would have been just another Drifters knockoff if it wasn’t for the way the lyrics seared the melody into the brain. Nathaniel Ruff’s lead vocal gave the piece the requisite urgency, and the clinking clave put the Latin under-beat into overdrive.

A little bit of soap

Will take away your perfume eventually

But a little bit of soap

Will never wash away the memory

Of your name in the night

That I call through the lonely years

A little bit of soap

Will never wash away my tears

—
A LITTLE BIT OF SOAP (BERT RUSSELL, 1961)

Berns had barely been in the music business one year, but he had made the rounds and it was starting to pay off. He was a likable guy and he was getting his songs recorded. When Russ Miller left Mellin, Berns moved up to office manager. His salary doubled to a hundred bucks a week. He hired Ray Passman, who had been working selling handmade furniture by his pal Paul Colby, a former music publishing
counter man running his own showroom on Second Avenue. Berns was selling songs and making records any way he could, but it was Luther Dixon of Scepter Records who thought Berns should be the recording artist.

Dixon was a classic r&b hustler who was riding high, running Scepter Records, home of the Shirelles, whose “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” hit number one in February 1961. He had met his boss, Florence Greenberg, during an elevator ride, but that was long enough. A middle-aged suburban New Jersey housewife, Greenberg not only managed the Shirelles, but also financed the group’s first single after her daughter told her about the group. Mary Jane went to Passaic High School with the quartet and attended the high school assembly where the four girls tore up the place with a simple song they wrote, “I Met Him on a Sunday.”

After the record started to catch on, Greenberg leased the master to Decca Records, who ran it up the charts and dropped the group. Greenberg was determined to start her own record company and she had crossed paths with Wally Roker, a former bird group bass vocalist who had been promoting records uptown for Bobby Robinson’s labels. It was Roker who introduced her to Dixon in the elevator. They went and had a cup of coffee and exchanged phone numbers.

Florence Greenberg grew up in the Lower East Side and took the first proposal that came her way, to get out of her parents’ home. She had been married for a lifetime to an accountant for a potato chip company. Her son Stanley was blinded in a delivery room accident and she became very involved in civic issues, summer camps for the handicapped, Republican county committee, that sort of thing. At an early age, Stanley showed some talent on piano and writing songs. It was his songwriting that led her to investigate the Brill Building and the music business. Her first taste was success—she made a tidy $4,000 profit on “I Met Him on a Sunday” from Decca—and she was intrigued. She called Dixon back and the next time they met, he introduced her to the joys of
interracial sex and the full madness of rhythm and blues. She started Scepter Records and hired her new boyfriend to run the company.

Dixon had knocked around the music business for years. He was a tall, thin knife of a man, and he liked to drink. Although Dixon almost never wrote a song without a collaborator, he had some good covers. Pat Boone cut his “Why Baby Why.” The big notch on his belt when he met Greenberg was “Sixteen Candles,” the 1958 hit he wrote (cowrote) and produced for the Crests. Working with some lyrics by the group’s lead vocalist, Shirley Owens, about a young girl deciding to give it up, Dixon fashioned a credible Top Forty hit for the Shirelles with “Tonight’s the Night” in 1960, enough to keep Scepter in business.

Around the same time, Carole King, an eighteen-year-old mother of a six-month-old in Sheepshead Bay, recorded a piano part and left a note propped up against the Norelco tape recorder for her songwriting partner husband, who would be coming home from work at the chemical plant and his Marine Corps Reserves meeting after she went off to play mah-jongg: “Donny needs a new song for the Shirelles tomorrow. Please write.”

Donny Kirshner was the music publisher who had signed King and her husband, lyricist Gerry Goffin. They had submitted fifty songs, so far without any appreciable success, to Kirshner, partner in Aldon Music of 1650 Broadway, a burgeoning teen pop enterprise. Aldon’s top writer was hitmaker Neil Sedaka, who knew King as Carol Klein at James Madison High School in Brooklyn and had originally steered her and her husband to Aldon. That night, Goffin had most of the song sketched out by the time his wife returned around midnight. By two in the morning, they had it done.

Kirshner liked the song so much, he took it to all-powerful Mitch Miller at Columbia Records and pitched it for Johnny Mathis. Miller told Kirshner it was a woman’s song. When Luther Dixon heard the demo, he immediately wanted the song for the next record by the Shirelles. The girls didn’t like what they heard—they thought the demo sounded
like a country and western record—but Dixon ruled at Scepter. Carole King, self-assured musically beyond her years, wrote a string arrangement after checking out a book about scoring from the public library. She played the kettle drums on the session. The Shirelles changed their minds about the song when they heard the track. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was the first number one hit by a black female vocal group, a huge breakthrough for the r&b independents, and Dixon was walking tall.

He had pieces of current hit songs by r&b crooner Gene McDaniels (“A Hundred Pounds of Clay”) and blues singer Jimmy Reed (“Big Boss Man”), and he continued to openly conduct his affair with his label boss. Florence Greenberg was a not especially attractive older woman, happy to be out of her suburban exile, set free into the big-city world of r&b and the Midtown record scene. But she was no cream puff. Fiercely protective of her girls and her interests and quick to act on anything that she perceived as a threat, she had a foul temper, a whiny, reedy voice, and the mouth of a sailor. Dixon walked a fine line with her, but she depended on him in the studio.

Chuck Jackson was the first artist Dixon signed to Wand Records, a second label Dixon started with Greenberg that was supposed to handle more gritty r&b than Scepter (Greenberg liked to name her labels after things queens owned; she called her first label Tiara). Jackson was the handsome lead vocalist of the Del Vikings, who had been encouraged to go solo by Jackie Wilson. Dixon saw Jackson appearing with Wilson’s revue at the Apollo and wanted to sign him. Despite interest from RCA Victor and Wilson’s label, Brunswick, Jackson went with the smaller label after praying to God for a sign. That sign came when the pair went to Dixon’s apartment and wrote Jackson’s first solo hit, “I Don’t Want to Cry,” released the week before the Berns record, which Dixon also put on Wand.

Dixon heard a demo Berns had made and wanted to know who the singer was. As a recording artist, Berns decided to call himself Russell
Byrd, yet another professional identity. The Russell Byrd record, “You’d Better Come Home,” rode on a swinging, sawing string part written by Carole King, who also played piano on the track. Berns does his Elvis imitation on the vocal, but the percussive repeated chorus—
you better, better, better, better come home right now
—gave the record a certain offbeat appeal.

Berns posed for Russell Byrd publicity photos in a jaunty suede cap, the Goya on his lap. His thumbnail was full of bull about his attending college and all the famous artists who had recorded his songs. He was photographed for the trades with Ray Passman and a publicist holding copies of the records on their fingers like donuts. Wally Roker, Scepter’s promotion man, took him off to afternoon TV dance shows in places like Pittsburgh and Providence. He did the
Clay Cole Show
in New York with Adam Wade (“Take Good Care of Her”). He primped his waterfall hairdo endlessly before lip-synching his record on camera, although he was already sporting a hairpiece. He did
American Bandstand
on the same show that Bobby Lewis played his big hit, “Tossin’ and Turnin’.” “You’d Better Come Home” spent the month of May 1961 on the charts, climbing all the way to number fifty on the
Billboard Hot 100
. Halfway there.

In August, with the Jarmels winding their way up the charts, Berns had songs on releases by Dottie Clark, Arthur Prysock, Sammy Turner, all of which he also produced, and Conway Twitty, the Nashville-based rock and roll star who cut a crazy little number Berns wrote with Passman called “It’s Driving Me Wild.” Berns also went back in the studio and made Hoagy Lands cry some more. He did four numbers for MGM Records, including one of Mellin’s old Ames Brothers songs, “I’m Yours,” under Mellin’s instructions to work the catalog.

Lands enters “My Tears Are Dry” sliding, gliding, sailing across a slow dirge, his voice fluttering over the descending chords and a bass vocalist. His confident, showy entrance frames the song in high drama. Comparisons with Sam Cooke would be inevitable. “It’s Gonna
Be Morning” starts with wistful acoustic guitars setting the smoldering track in motion as Lands dances with the melody, dropping little sobs and gospel wails into the verse. The Bert Russell song is hopeful, but the sense of a troubled past hovers like a dark cloud over the song’s protagonist. He sounds as if he is trying hard to convince himself.
I’m never gonna cry, never gonna cry another wasted tear
, Hoagy sings, but it doesn’t ring true. It sounds more like a desperate prayer from someone who knows he is doomed to cry.

Luther Dixon liked Berns, even if Berns thought Florence Greenberg was an unpleasant old bag. Dixon and Berns were both street corner guys. They knew where they stood with one another. Phil Spector was supposed to produce the next Russell Byrd single and he did cut a Berns-Passman song, “Nights of Mexico,” with Berns/Byrd as vocalist that sat in the can waiting for a second side. Berns pitched Dixon still more material and Dixon put him together with a male-female vocal group called the Renaults, who had been around a couple of years without getting anywhere. But they could sing. It was a little noticed record at the time—or since—but it was on “Just like Mine,” where Berns started writing his own story in his songs.

If everybody’s heart

Was made of glass

And broken in little pieces like mine

If everybody’s heart

Was made of glass

They would feel the sands of time

Just like mine

—
JUST LIKE MINE (BERT RUSSELL, 1961)

Berns had not yet been in the record business a second full year. Maybe he hadn’t made it in any final, definitive way, but he could hold his head up at the weekly Sunday dinner with Charlie and Sadie in the Bronx. Berns had already lived longer than doctors told him he
was going to live. He was in a hurry and didn’t talk about it much. He told Don Drowty about his heart—Drowty also had rheumatic fever as a youth—but he laughed it off, as if it were a joke, no big thing. Drowty didn’t buy it. He thought it was a very big thing.

But Berns wanted more. He knew he had places to go and he was running late.