Here Comes the Night (33 page)
This slob songwriter with hair over his collar was hardly her type. She went more for the blond-haired, blue-eyed model. He didn’t make
a move, but she offered him no encouragement. They talked about records. She knew “Tell Her” and “Twist and Shout” from dancing at the Roundtable. He played her some acetates and told her about working with Solomon Burke. The evening ended uneventfully and she took her sister back to Long Island.
Before the next weekend, her sister Marcy started bugging Ilene to take her into town again to see Mickey Raygor and Bert Berns. This time they went to dinner at an Italian restaurant before returning to Berns’s place. Raygor and her sister disappeared in the back. Berns sat around playing guitar and talking with her.
She drove her sister in to see Raygor a couple more times and sat around having conversations with his funny, warm friend. She didn’t feel attracted to him, but she was fascinated as he spoke to her about the Nazis and his passion for Israel. She knew he was a deep, sensitive man, and the night he reached over, turned out the light, and kissed her, she fell in love with him the instant he did.
At age thirty-five, Berns had outlived his doctors’ most optimistic forecasts. His heart was helplessly swelling in his chest. Circulation problems caused him to perspire. He glowed with a sweaty sheen. He gulped pills and obsessively visited doctors. He saw Midtown specialists he met the week before and still went to his old doctor from the Bronx. He had money and success, but little else.
His sister had married an upright citizen, a likable guy who ran a knitting mill in Brooklyn, and was raising a family. Berns liked getting on the floor and playing with the kids, Neil and Robin.
Hip as he was, he was not sophisticated. He had vaulted virtually from living with his parents to living in a penthouse. He had loud, garish artwork on the walls. A large reclining nude hung above his sofa and in the corner another nude was beside his piano, the lid covered with knickknacks, candles, and a framed photo of him and Wexler. There were only two raggedy chairs his cats tore up. He was called a genius by the people in his field and he didn’t know about simple things like income tax.
Solomon Burke laughed as Berns messed up a pair of steaks he was grilling for the two of them on the penthouse terrace, feeding their dinner instead to Dino and ordering out for Chinese. Burke found Berns mooning over his new girlfriend and singing him uncharacteristic upbeat love songs. Burke told Berns he should marry the girl and get back in the heartbreak business.
After weeks of her coming into town to spend the night with him, Berns fired up the Corvette he owned but couldn’t drive (too many speeding tickets) and cruised out to Long Island to meet his prospective in-laws, worried all the way that he would be pulled over. He walked in wearing his typical corduroy jacket with the arm patches, open-neck shirt, no necktie, his shaggy hair over the collar. Ilene was so smitten she didn’t realize he was wearing a toupee. After that evening, Berns took her home and she never left.
Wexler not only was the best man at the wedding, but also paid for everything but the booze and the flowers, which the bride’s dad covered. The band—featuring Berns session stalwarts such as Gary Chester and Paul Griffin—played for free. They decorated the penthouse terrace luau-style and set up tables everywhere. Dick Rowe and Phil Solomon and their wives came over from Great Britain.
It was a lavish, New York rooftop Jewish wedding on a sunny July day, visions dancing in Berns’s head of the wife, family, and home of his own he never before really allowed himself to imagine in his life. His mother did not approve. She sternly warned him that marrying a woman so young and beautiful would kill him with his heart condition.
“Under the Boardwalk” by the Drifters spent all summer on the charts, rising to number four in August, Atlantic’s first big hit after a long parched winter of discontent.
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Arranger Mike Leander’s crisp take on Berns’s Afro-Cuban approach to the Drifters’ trademark sound, first
tried out on the Solomon Burke album track “You Can’t Love ’Em All” gave “Boardwalk” a familiar yet fresh sound for the tired vocal group, ten years down the road from Clyde McPhatter. Written in a cubicle at TM Music on the same Brill Building floor as Leiber and Stoller’s office, Kenny Young strumming the guitar and Artie Resnick scrawling out the lyrics, “Under the Boardwalk” practically invented the summer song genre, in addition to revitalizing the Drifters’ marquee value just when Atlantic needed it badly.
Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” ran out of gas midchart, but having the two hits running at the same time rejuvenated the company. Berns put Atlantic back in the game. Kingpin Baltimore disc jockey Fat Daddy, a three-hundred-pound black gentleman named Paul Johnson who wore robes and a crown in public appearances and was a frequent weekend guest at Wexler’s Great Neck place, wrote in his pick hits column in
Billboard:
“This is producer Bert Berns’ year.”
Berns tucked away two surefire follow-ups for the Drifters in August, cutting Resnick and Young’s sequel to “Under the Boardwalk,” a supple autumnal ballad explicitly redolent of the original hit, “I’ve Got Sand in My Shoes,” and “Saturday Night at the Movies,” another upbeat snapshot of teen life from Mann and Weil. He cut Solomon Burke preaching “The Price,” no matter what Wexler said, and a song of his own, “Yes I Do.” Berns did some incidental projects for the company; he supervised an LP of the Drifters singing supper club standards—both the Coasters and Ben E. King had made similar albums for the label.
He cut a protégé of Fat Daddy’s named Kenny Hamber for a single on an Atlantic subsidiary of a song Berns wrote with Mike Leander called “Show Me Your Monkey.” The premise of the song was that if the girl really loves the singer, she’ll dance especially well for him, doing various dance steps of the day—the twist, the mashed potato, the hully gully, the monkey. On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to get past the fairly obvious double entendre of the title line, especially when the
band takes a stop break on the record just before Hamber shouts,
Show me your monkey
.
“Don’t be misled by the title,” said
Billboard
. The tidy, rocking little track picked up some play but, perhaps not surprisingly, never caught on.
Outside of Atlantic, now Berns did little. He produced a session with the great Roy Hamilton, long past the manly baritone vocalist’s commercial peak, reprising his “She Makes Me Wanna Dance” for MGM Records, and dusted off an old Burt Bacharach instrumental track to have session vocalist Jimmy Radcliffe add new lead vocals to a Bacharach-David number, “Long after Tonight Is All Over,” which Aaron Schroeder put out on Musicor. Atlantic was keeping Berns busy.
Behind the scenes at Atlantic Records times were changing and the partners were making important moves. They closed the deal in September 1964 to buy out Ertegun’s old dentist, Dr. Sabit, who made a fortune on his original investment, and Miriam Bienstock, Atlantic founder Herb Abramson’s ex-wife, long since remarried to Freddy Bienstock of Hill & Range, monocle-wearing cousin to the Aberbach brothers and former office boy to the great Max Dreyfus. Miriam vaguely tolerated Wexler, but she had no interest whatsoever in a street character like Berns, whom she regarded as Wexler’s latest grubby fascination. She looked the other way. Berns was too uncultivated, too déclassé for her Park Avenue world. But Wexler loved the guy. He was practically exultant that he had discovered and groomed this brilliant record man leading Atlantic’s salvation.
She remained steadfastly, vociferously opposed to any possible sale, so they made the tough broad walk the plank. Miriam Bienstock had been instrumental in the nuts and bolts of Atlantic’s business since day one and was responsible for such key areas as music publishing and international sales. They asked her what she wanted and gave her the price she named—$600,000. As she walked out of the office with her check, she offered a parting shot. “I give you assholes six months,” she said.
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Billboard Hot 100
Top Five, week of August 15, 1964: 1. “Where Did Our Love Go” by the Supremes; 2. “Everybody Loves Somebody” by Dean Martin; 3. “A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles; 4. “Under the Boardwalk” by the Drifters; 5. “The House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals.
T
HE BRITISH INCURSION
on the American pop charts led by the Beatles that January, 1964 was so intense and unexpected that it swept away all before it. Even Wexler bowed down. Only a year before, he sent Paul Marshall away when his general counsel showed up wanting to give him the new Beatles records. Wexler now eagerly licensed an ancient recording of the Beatles, cut three years earlier in Germany when the band was hired to back British expatriate vocalist Tony Sheridan. He released the one track featuring John Lennon on vocals, the Jazz Age chestnut “Ain’t She Sweet,” and floated the single into the Top Twenty. British records suddenly suffused the American hit parade. The year before, there were none. The next year, somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the big hits in this country were British.
Although British culture had been making inroads on the American scene over the previous few years on the Broadway stage and in movie theaters, nothing in those early signs suggested that British pop music would swell up out of London and become the single most significant trend in the American pop music marketplace since the original introduction of rock and roll ten years before. These guitar-playing British art school dropouts were practicing a distinctly American form of music, echoes of a raucous din first raised in the faraway former colonies, colored by the working-class, underdog, disaffected sensibilities
of these British youth, oddly enough, not greatly unlike their counterparts in the American social substrata, the black musicians who made much of the original music in the first place. On levels they didn’t even understand, these Brits connected with the American blacks.
Separated by geography, history, and culture, the postwar British public saw American life as exotic and adventuresome. American racial issues meant little in England, so that element of the music was absent from their understanding. It was all music from darkest America. The rank consumerism of America shocked and fascinated an England still recovering from the deprivations of war. In the austere, repressive British culture of the day, the carefree rebelliousness implicit in rock and roll stirred unimaginable emotions in young British musicians.
While some of the English enthusiasts were attracted to even more subterranean American musical currents represented by vernacular blues artists such as John Lee Hooker or Jimmy Reed—British audiences had been exposed to that fundamental music since midfifties performances by Chicago bluesmen Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters, and a subsequent procession of others—most of these British pop upstarts drew their clearest inspirations from the New York rhythm and blues scene. Lennon and McCartney really just wanted to be Goffin and King.
Mickie Most was the twenty-six-year-old son of a regimental sergeant-major who sang as half of the Most Brothers at the 2i’s Coffee Bar, the birthplace of British rock and roll in London, before moving to South Africa, where he essentially introduced rock and roll to the country and landed eleven consecutive records on the charts, largely covers of U.S. rock and roll hits that he basically produced by himself. He returned to England in 1962 and had some modest success as a recording artist (“Mister Porter,” number forty-five U.K. 1963) but was working as a retail distributor, a position that would have been called rack jobber in the United States, when he signed as an independent producer the Newcastle r&b band the Animals and landed a deal with England’s Columbia Records for the group.
Mickie Most admired and studied the New York maestros and visited New York in 1963 to look for material. He knew publisher Bobby Mellin from the London music business, and Most picked up fresh Berns demos from the New York office. After an initial session with the Animals concentrating on the band’s r&b repertoire, Most brought the group back in the studio in February 1964 to record more commercial material, including the Bert Russell–Wes Farrell song “Baby Let Me Take You Home,” which would be the band’s debut U.K. single in March 1964.