Here Comes the Night (21 page)

Berns took a powerful singer named Sylvia Hill into the studio for Capitol and recorded four songs in January 1962 at a full session with strings and horns, arranged by Teacho Wiltshire. Berns chose two songs for the single by songwriters Bob Elgin and Kay Rogers—pseudonyms for Stanley Kahan and Eddie Snyder, a couple of characters who also shared songwriting credits with Scepter’s Luther Dixon on the recent Gene McDaniels hit, “A Hundred Pounds of Clay.” Berns also recorded one of his own songs with Hill, “Tell Him,” that he kept in the can.

He also cut a new Hoagy Lands single that month for MGM Records, where his old pal Julie Rifkind ran promotion and operated the r&b label Cub Records. Berns recorded Lands on a roaring version of “Goodnight Irene,” the Leadbelly song the Weavers had introduced to the pop charts many years before. Hoagy soared over the single-string, solo guitar introduction and jumped on it when the band slammed in behind him on the chorus. The flip side was another Bert Russell song, “It Ain’t as Easy as That,” started by Lands gaily singing
la-la-la-la
,
skipping into a lighthearted verse about how difficult it is to meet girls, but building to a near-hysterical finish two verses and two choruses later—
I have lost and I’ve been tossed into the sea of lovers’ lonely tears
—Lands pleading desperately,
It ain’t easy for me, baby
.

Berns and Roker knocked out two more quickie George Hudson albums in rapid order.
George Hudson Presents Dance Time
featured three new “dance” songs from Berns—“Do the Bug,” “C’mon an’ Slop,” and “Bronx Stomp,” along with another piece cowritten with Passman, “Hully Gully Firehouse,” that was a shameless appropriation of the song’s namesake. Gil Hamilton supplied the vocals again. The third album,
Give ’Em Soul
, used the year’s new buzzword in the black community—“soul”—and featured a slight instrumental of the same title credited to Berns and Roker, little more than an extended guitar solo by session player Jimmy Spruill with the title repeated over the track every so often by young Hamilton. The single was released under the name Apple Adam, only the first pseudonym Hamilton would be adopting in his recording career. Hoagy Lands also helped out on vocals and sang some of the songs. It was a kind of nothing album, but Berns wrote evocative liner notes.

Give ’em Soul! Okay . . . so you scratch your head, you look at the guy who represents the company and he’s dead serious. Furthermore, he’s telling you all the sweet things a weary producer loves to hear: “Money’s no object . . . get all the down cats you need . . . just give ’em soul . . . ” So you finish scratching your head and you reach for the nearest phone. You’re cooking, you’re really cooking! So you call Teacho Wiltshire to make the arrangements, and he says “okay.” Then you get tensed up because it hits you like a rock about all the things you’ll need—songs, the right artists, the right sounds . . . give ’em soul. The next couple of days your desk is piled up with all the great R and B records of the past, including a few original things which will knock everyone out. And then, right smack between all that sweet confusion, all the empty and grotesque coffee containers and crushed cigarette butts, it was there. I mean pow!

I don’t think I can express the actual recording session with mere words. The studio was electrified. The musicians, engineers, and invited friends of the artists were gassed as each playback poured through the speakers. . . . Well, it was almost over. Someone called a five minute break. The piano looked inviting to me, so I walked over with a cup of coffee and began to groove, myself. Nothing much, but the big grand responded to a grinding beat. Someone picked up a guitar and fell in. Then the drums and bass gave it a rhythmic pattern that caused us all to lay on it with an uncanny drive. A voice came booming through the studio speaker to keep it going, so we did. The strings returned and, man, did they moan for us. It was too much! Nobody wanted to stop. My fingers were killing me, but I kept going. The knowing smiles in the rhythm section kept egging each other on as if to say: “Keep it moving man, we’re saying something.” Once again, the huge suspended speaker: “Okay . . . okay . . . great . . . just great. Thank you everybody, that’s it.” After the playback, everybody in the studio knew it . . . that was the title song of the album: Give ’Em Soul. It was four o’clock in the morning when I started walking home. I was beat but it was a real good kind of tiredness that was hanging on me; just light enough to let my imagination half dream of the people in Tennessee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, California, Georgia, and down home U.S.A. who would be poppin’ their fingers and leaning in and understanding—really digging why we call the album Give ’Em Soul
.

Also during the
Give ’Em Soul
album sessions, Berns pulled out the instrumental track he recorded in January with Sylvia Hill of his song “Tell Him” and cut Gil Hamilton overdubbing his vocals to the song as “Tell Her.” The record was a little jewel—Wiltshire’s slashing string line darts back and forth across a thumping bass figure as the introduction leads to the brash opening couplet,
I know something about love / You’ve got to want it bad
—but it went almost entirely unnoticed when the single came out on Capitol. Hamilton, who was fresh from Florida and thrilled to be making $55 for a day in the studio, had recently finished a couple of months’ work on the road as a member of the Drifters and barely noticed himself.

Both Roker and Berns also retained their association at Scepter Records. Florence Greenberg, the queen of Scepter, didn’t care much for Berns, but she let Luther Dixon run the musical end of the company. It was practically the only part of the lives of the people around her she didn’t try to control. She certainly stepped into Dixon’s affairs anytime she felt so inclined. She refused to let him pick up the Four Seasons’ “Sherry,” which Dixon thought was a surefire hit, because she couldn’t stand the record’s producer, Bob Crewe, quietly homosexual but excruciatingly eccentric.

She could be openly cruel with her blind son, Stanley, whom she kept around the office in various menial jobs, some thought just so he would be handy to humiliate. She did have a temper. Jerry Leiber watched in amazement one night at Al and Dick’s, the West Fifty-Fourth Street steakhouse where the music crowd met for drinks, as Florence beat Luther into submission with her purse. She often treated her good-looking beau, eighteen years her junior, like a child. But Dixon managed to keep the Shirelles in business and the Shirelles were Scepter. The girls had “Baby It’s You” in the Top Ten in January 1962 and, glory be, a second number one hit that May with “Soldier Boy,” a treacly, obvious piece of sentimental manipulation cowritten with Dixon by the distinctly unmusical Florence Greenberg.

They cut a second Russell Byrd single—a weird song Berns wrote called “Little Bug” that has Berns in deep discussion about his loneliness with an insect (
My heart is pumping a whole lot of tears
)—released in early 1962 on the Scepter subsidiary, Wand Records, with the B-side Phil Spector produced the year before, “Nights of Mexico.” It passed with slight notice (“attractive tune and moving performance make this a record with a chance . . . ” said
Billboard
). Berns cut a second session for Wand with the Renaults, who had recorded his autobiographical “Just like Mine” the year before, this time retooling the Platters hit “Only You” to little effect.

Berns also undertook for Scepter the case of Lori Rogers, Broadway teen ingénue, not yet fifteen years old, who had a small but cute part in the Broadway production of
Bye Bye Birdie
and now a similarly small but cute part in the new musical
All American
, starring the old Scarecrow himself, Ray Bolger, at the Winter Garden, around the corner from 1650 Broadway. Berns and Ray Passman fashioned a bit of tongue-in-cheek teen fluff, “Seymour,” for her perky persona that veered clearly into parody. It was a typical Broadway deal, but at least Berns got a plug in Walter Winchell’s column.

Berns was making fun of a type of record he himself never made. This kind of frankly adolescent pop usually came without irony, but could also contain a wholesome amount of self-deprecating humor (like Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin’s “Who Put the Bomp”). It was often difficult to tell the sincere from the caricature and the difference frequently didn’t matter. Teen pop in all forms flourished. The Aldon songwriters were all over the charts. Carole King and Gerry Goffin were crafting pop songs with great musical and lyrical gifts with near industrial precision. Neil Sedaka could be annoyingly frothy and lightweight, but his instinct for melody, his musical sense, and the precision of his performances could never be faulted. Donny Kirshner decided to move into the label business himself, launching Dimension Records that summer with a number one hit from Carole King and Gerry Goffin,
“The Loco-Motion,” by Little Eva.
I know you’ll get to like it if you give it a chance
. Berns may have been too funky to be that candy-ass, but he was about to meet his match.

Originally there were four Isley brothers—Ronald, O’Kelly, Rudolph, and Vernon—sons of Kelly and Sallye Isley of Cinncinati, Ohio. Three-year-old Ronald won a $25 war bond in a church spiritual contest and, by the time he was seven, he was singing onstage at the Regal Theater, alongside Dinah Washington and others. With their mother as chaperone, the four young Isleys toured Midwest churches until youngest brother Vernon was killed in a traffic accident. The parents convinced the brothers to regroup a year later and they left for New York in 1957 with bus fare and $20 from the family’s savings. They made a couple of small-time vocal group records. George Goldner discovered them and cut a few sides with them.

But it was for RCA Victor that the Isley Brothers recorded the classic “Shout, Parts I and II” in 1959. The six-minute opus featured organist Herman Stevens from the boys’ hometown church and represented a definitive distillation of the Pentecostal experience translated into secular terms, a work of sheer genius. It was never a big hit—forty-seven on the pop charts; never made the r&b charts at all—but almost immediately entered the literature as a standard. The Top Ten version by Joey Dee and the Starliters in March 1962 even brought the Isley Brothers original back on the charts for a couple of weeks.

After cutting three singles with Leiber and Stoller on Atlantic the previous year, the Isleys signed with Luther Dixon and Wand in 1962 and had already failed to click with a dance song called “The Snake” when they went into the studio a second time with Dixon, who, this time, had Bert Berns in tow.

Dixon spent most of the three-hour session at Bell Sound in March 1962 trying to get the Isleys to lay down an acceptable vocal take on top of a prerecorded track for a song written by Burt Bacharach, coauthor of the Shirelles hit “Baby It’s You.” The new song, “Make It Easy
on Yourself,” was somewhat tricky, hardly conventional pop fare and certainly unlike anything the gospel-fueled Isleys had ever previously encountered. Dixon and the Isleys were working with the song’s original demo, recorded by Bacharach with a studio singer named Dionne Warwick. But the Isleys were not up to it. The song was abandoned.

Berns stepped forward with “Twist and Shout,” the song he watched Wexler and Spector butcher a year before. This time, he would be the producer. The Isleys didn’t know Berns. They hated the song. They didn’t want to do any twist song. Wally Roker and Luther Dixon, representing the label management, expressed a contrary viewpoint. It had been a frustrating day already and angry words were exchanged. Furniture was broken. There were a lot of brothers arguing loudly in the control booth, and when the smoke cleared, Bert Berns, Solomon Burke’s “paddy motherfucker,” took over and produced the record in what remained of the session. At last, Berns was in command of his song’s creative destiny.

“Twist and Shout” hit the charts as soon as the record was released that June, a smash on both the pop and r&b charts. The record was everything Berns wanted it to be. On the Isley Brothers record, Berns gave the song the sound he always intended—the Cuban
guajiro
rhythm he first strummed to the chords of “La Bamba” that morning in his office with Ray Passman. The Isleys breathed gospel intensity into the simple, spare arrangement. They climbed all over the song’s architecture, building to two walloping crescendos in the record’s two and half minutes. Teacho Wiltshire’s horn parts were straight from any Latin dance band songbook, but this was not some distant American cousin of the Brazilian samba. This was Afro-Cuban rock and roll. The mystery of the mambo lurked at the heart of this record.

The record ran four months on both the pop and r&b charts. The Isley Brothers were selling a ton of records that summer. Florence Greenberg hadn’t had a record this big by anybody on her label other than the Shirelles. So, Berns went back into the studio with the
brothers to record an album he filled from the catalog, including numbers such as “I Say Love,” “You Better Come Home,” and “Don’t You Feel” that he had already tried with other acts. He used his old pal Herbie Wasserman on drums. Now he was in the record business.