Here Comes the Night (23 page)

When they did return, one of the girls was missing—her father didn’t approve—so their pianist filled in on her vocal part. The young man also arranged the background vocals and turned the Gil Hamilton solo performance into a group vehicle. Leiber liked it and suggested the pianist, twenty-one-year-old Herb Rooney, join the group. Leiber also announced to the group they would now be known as the Exciters, a name that did not necessarily sit well with all its members, but who nonetheless chose not to say anything.

In short order, these young, starry-eyed teens and their older brother figure were standing in the center of a full-scale Leiber and Stoller session call at Bell Studios; strings, horns, additional vocalists, a half dozen percussion players. Arranger Teacho Wiltshire adjusted the key and accelerated the tempo slightly, but otherwise it was the same basic arrangement Berns had used on the Sylvia Hill session that previous January. Brenda Reid scorched the lead vocal. They didn’t even notice the songwriter standing in a corner and nobody pointed him out.

Berns did not write teenage romance. His songs contained the very real presence of sex and obsession. The stakes are high and the prices are dear. Reid, this young innocent from Jamaica, Queens, a self-taught
singer without a soupçon of artifice, carries the knowledge of deeper, fiercer emotions than she can possibly understand because they are bricked into the lyrics.
If you want him to be the very part of you that makes you want to breathe
. . . Leiber was right. As the record sailed into the Top Ten on United Artists, they decided to give Berns more work.

Leiber and Stoller didn’t care for the teenage slant the whole market had taken. Music publishing was their game and the only way Leiber and Stoller knew to promote their publishing was to make records with the songs. They certainly didn’t feel qualified to write songs for these acts. They were comfortable writing and producing “I Keep Forgettin’” sung by Chuck Jackson on Wand, a brilliantly devised instrumental track heavy with trademark percussion matched to some of Leiber’s most pungent recent lyrics, but that kind of sophisticated r&b was increasingly scarce on today’s hit parade.

They were losing their enthusiasm for making music, as they felt themselves sliding further out of touch with the market. They started to rely more on writers they signed to their publishing company, Trio Music, to provide songs for the records they produced. There was no way they put the kind of pride and joy they did in Drifters records into Jay and the Americans, a wholly inferior white version of the black original that Leiber and Stoller recorded for United Artists.

They got “She Cried” from Greg Richards and Ted Daryll, two young contract writers at Trio, and that hokum sold more than a million records. Brylcreemed and ready for his close-up, Hollywood pretty boy Mike Clifford was signed to a West Coast–based manager, Helen Noga, the old battle-axe who handled Johnny Mathis. His syrupy hit, “Close to Cathy,” must have made Leiber and Stoller want to vomit, but they were rewarded with another big hit for United Artists. They wrote lyrics to “My Clair de Lune” for square Steve Lawrence, which is nowhere near as hip as writing lyrics to “Flyin’ Home” for swinging Chris Connor, as they once did when they were still working with Atlantic.

They did continue to produce the Drifters and, once again, revitalized the group’s failing fortunes in September 1962 with “Up on the Roof,” one of the most rich and bracing pieces yet from the pen and piano of Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Leiber and Stoller rewrote the bridge, after Goffin and King got stuck, but declined credit.

THAT WAS THE
fall of the great bossa nova scare. “Is Bossa Nova the New Twist?” asked
Billboard
. The smooth, cool combination of guitarist Charlie Byrd and saxophonist Stan Getz on an album of contemporary Brazilian compositions titled
Jazz Samba
started the flash flood. More than fifteen recording artists rushed to the market with versions of “One Note Samba” by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Newton Mendonça—Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Tito Puente, Dizzy Gillespie among them—and Ella Fitzgerald was rush-releasing her version of Jobim and Mendonça’s “Desafinado,” backed with “Stardust Bossa Nova.”

Getz and Byrd played their version of “Desafinado,” the record that started all this fuss, on
The Perry Como Show
on TV in October, but no Elvis-style rumblings occurred. Former teen idol Paul Anka bowed his bossa nova original, “Eso Beso,” on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. A sold-out Carnegie Hall concert in November featured Byrd and Getz, Brazilians Jobim and João Gilberto, plus Dizzy Gillespie, who also had a bossa nova album. Bacharach watched from the audience in rapture. There was no dance yet to accompany the craze, but Fred Astaire Studios had their best people working on it. The record business, poised to catch an incipient trend, held its breath.

In Brazil, bossa nova expressed a new national spirit rising from the ashes of the long-run regime of dictator Getulio Vargas, who first came to power in a bloodless coup in 1930 and ruled Brazil like his role model, Benito Mussolini of Italy, until his suicide in office in 1954. Under the spell of a wave of optimism, as Brazil, with a new, democratically elected leader, rallied for sweeping industrial and social changes, bossa nova emerged as a reflection of the country’s buoyant
new mood. A 1958 record called “Chega de Saudade” was the starting point. The song was sung by guitarist João Gilberto. Bossa nova was modern Brazil—fresh and sleek, sensual yet nonexotic.

Leiber and Stoller couldn’t resist the bossa nova. They took three members of the Clovers—the old Atlantic vocal group whose last hit, “Love Potion #9,” Leiber and Stoller wrote and produced three years before in 1959—and their new lead vocalist Roosevelt “Tippie” Hubbard and cut “Bossa Nova, Baby” and “The Bossa Nova (My Heart Said),” neither of which were, strictly speaking, bossa nova records. They were comical/musical gems that recalled their finest work with the Coasters.

Leiber and Stoller liked the record so much, they decided to go back into the record business for the first time since they folded their Spark label and moved east seven long years before. They formed Tiger Records and released the Tippie and the Clovers single in November 1962. Ahmet and Wexler had shielded Leiber and Stoller from many of the tawdry inner workings of the record business and the songwriters knew next to nothing about graft and corruption. They received a “Pick of the Week” from
Billboard
and the brilliant little record withered away and died (although Elvis would make a million-seller of “Bossa Nova, Baby” the next year). The record label was quickly forgotten.

Leiber and Stoller not only turned to contract songwriters to provide the material for records, but also started to use other producers to make the records, farming off the results to United Artists under their deal there, down the hall with Johnny Bienstock at Big Top, or elsewhere. They used Burt Bacharach and Hal David to conduct sessions of their own material for Leiber and Stoller productions, including the brilliant “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” by Tommy Hunt and “It’s Love That Really Counts (In the Long Run)” by the Shirelles, for Scepter. They formed a music publishing partnership with Bacharach and David, fresh out of Famous Music, called U.S. Songs, another key acquisition in their growing publishing portfolio.

They tried out Berns on a couple of oddball assignments. Myrna March was a voluptuous 39D redhead with a va-va-voom act that Leiber and Stoller had previously tried to conjure on a piece called “I Can’t Say No,” set to a stripper’s beat with arranger Artie Butler shouting his head off in the background. It was a sign of how low Leiber and Stoller had sunk that they were doing the job for Morris Levy’s Roulette Records. At their behest, Berns also cut three songs with the sex kitten, including “Baby,” a slinky remake of “Baby (I Wanna Be Loved),” the old song he wrote with Mickey Lee Lane and which he had recorded only six months before with Solomon Burke as a gospel-based number.

Trio Music songwriter Tony Powers found Beverly Warren singing with some friends under the elevated tracks in Sunnyside, Queens, just across the river. He was on his way for burgers at the White Castle, but he stopped and left his card. When she and her all male associates showed up at the Brill Building for their audition, fifteen-year-old Warren was wearing her trademark cat’s eye makeup, white lipstick, and teased hair. Powers’s songwriting partner, Ellie Greenwich, who sported a teased blonde beehive herself, liked what she heard.

When young Warren and the rest of her vocal group arrived at Bell Sound for the recording session, they were told the producers wanted only the girl. The guys went home. Suddenly all by herself, Beverly Warren nervously walked into the crowded control room, where busy engineers and other record business types surrounded Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and the session’s producer, Bert Berns, who looked up. “Here comes our new star,” said Berns, and a feeling of well-being washed through the young girl.

They also sent Berns to cop Phil Spector’s licks. After Spector launched a rumbling, echoey, reverbed cover of the old song from the Disney movie, “Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah,” by a group of Hollywood session singers Spector named Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans on his Philles label, Berns found a set of New York session singers and took them into
the studio to cut a near-identical model of the song “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.”

The four women who sang the record had worked around town since they were Bronx high school kids going as the DeVaurs. They had been singing sessions with background vocal contractor Arthur Crier, who pitched them at Berns. Carl Spencer, sometimes Berns’s songwriting collaborator (“White Gardenia”) and one of Crier’s regular singers, handled the showpiece bass vocal on the bridge. When the record came out on United Artists that December, the singers were astonished to discover that, without anybody telling them, the group had been named Baby Jane and the Rockabyes—the Jerry Leiber touch—after the recent movie
What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?
The record did surprisingly well. “Sold 175,000 1st Ten Days,” said the trade ads, and that ain’t Purina. “Produced by Leiber and Stoller,” said the label. “Directed by Bert Berns.”

If working with Leiber and Stoller was almost inevitable, Berns pairing with Juggy Murray was somewhat less likely. Raised in Hell’s Kitchen, Murray made his money in Harlem’s numbers racket before deciding to try his hand at the record game. He was a street-smart hustler with a few connections to Harlem disc jockeys and no experience. His first hit on Sue Records—named after both his mother and his daughter—came the next year in 1958, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling” by sometime Drifters vocalist Bobby Hendricks, backed up on the session by some sidelining Coasters.

Juggy pretty much invented Ike and Tina Turner. He flew to St. Louis to meet with Ike Turner after hearing the demo of “A Fool in Love” and told Turner that he should feature the gal in the band. They racked up big numbers on Sue in 1960 with “A Fool in Love” and others such as “I Idolize You” or “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.” Murray kept his own counsel and worked his side of the street. He used top Brill Building arrangers and contracted with the best sidemen. He produced his own sessions and he worked his own releases. He and Bobby
Robinson were the only two black label operators in New York. He was wary of prejudice. Murray didn’t mess much with cats like Berns.

Juggy Murray, in fact, financed a bold black musicians’ collective in New Orleans, a little worker-run cooperative to control the means of production in the local music business down there. Organizer Harold Battiste was a deep thinker with an inflamed sense of racial injustice. He pulled together fellow New Orleans musicians to form AFO Productions—All For One—a revolutionary effort to allow musicians to share in a record’s revenue. He signed up some of the town’s leading black musicians—saxophonist Alvin “Red” Tyler, pianist Allen Toussaint—and hired a black attorney. With Juggy Murray, they had a black national distributor.

They printed up black business cards with their names embossed in gold. Battiste envisioned nothing less than a black-owned major label, and the second AFO single Murray released, “I Know” by Barbara George, was indeed a nationwide smash Top Five million-seller in 1961. But Murray bought her contract and pulled the plug on AFO after a half dozen releases, pissed off that Battiste cut “Ya Ya” by Lee Dorsey for his crosstown rival Bobby Robinson. Brotherhood only went so far.

With Berns, Murray produced a third Russell Byrd record, “Hitch Hike,” a two-part dance epic with considerable debt to the 1960 Ray Bryant Combo hit, “The Madison Time,” Berns calling out moves—
Now make a three-step turn, baby, you’re on your own
—in front of a cooking band on dance floor overdrive, King Curtis snaking his saxophone through much of the track (“Soul twisting,” says Berns). There is nothing to even vaguely suggest white people might have been involved in the making of this record, including Berns’s raspy vocalisms.

Murray didn’t make records for the pop charts like Luther Dixon; his records were all for a black audience.

Murray produced almost all the records on his label—“A Juggy Production” was a trademark on every single—but he let Berns give
the Isley Brothers treatment on Sue to Glen and Francis Hockaday, a pair of brothers with strong voices, on the only record they would ever make. Berns reworked the Russell-Medley “Hold On Baby” from the Isley Brothers for the Hockadays, keeping a little “Twist and Shout” in the introduction, but giving these voices a great, roaring ride on another one of his sparkling little Cuban rock and roll songs, a much improved version over the Isley Brothers recording. Nobody else was making records that sounded like this.

Berns and Murray even went in the studio together again in January 1963 with Murray’s favorite artist, vocalist Baby Washington, when Murray produced her pop chart breakthrough, “That’s How Heartaches Are Made.” Murray was not known for creative collaborations and he didn’t expect white people to give him a fair shake in the business. Justine Washington, also known as Jeanette, had been around since she sang with her vocal group, the Hearts. She had made more than twenty records since 1956, including a couple of decent r&b chart entries. Murray wanted to move her to larger, grander ballads, but first she had songs of her own she wanted to record and he waited her out. When the day came, he brought Berns in on the session and gave Berns the production credit on the single’s B-side, “There He Is,” recorded at the same session, his way of sharing production credit. Murray did not suffer fools—especially white fools—but he knew Berns was a real record man, whatever color he was.