Here Comes the Night (37 page)
The Strangeloves didn’t play instruments other than their zebra-skin African hair drums and, without the tour’s house band, backing them up in Dayton was a local group, Rick and the Raiders, who had been playing shows all summer for radio station WING. Guitarist Rick Zehringer graduated high school little more than a month before, and his fourteen-year-old brother Randy played drums in the quartet. Dressed in their new Beatles suits, ripping through Chuck Berry numbers, warming up the crowd for the Strangeloves, these raw, young rock and roll musicians set off bells for Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein.
Backstage after the show, they asked the teenage musicians if they wanted to go to New York and make a record. They drove to the Zehringer home and woke up their parents. The next morning, they drove off together—the Strangeloves in one car and the mom and dad driving the other. The band members argued among themselves so much on the trip, the Strangeloves started calling them the Hatfields and the McCoys. They went straight into the studio. They used the instrumental track already recorded for the Strangeloves and had the boys sing over the existing recording. Sixteen-year-old Rick Zehringer—about to change that to Rick Derringer—laid down a guitar solo. When they heard the playback, people in the control room jumped up and yelled, “Number one.”
Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein went straight from the studio to look for Berns. They soon discovered that Berns and his wife were on his annual August vacation at Grossinger’s, the same routine he had followed since he was a child. He and Ilene were there with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Artie Butler and his wife. They had ridden their Harleys. The three Strangeloves piled in their car with an acetate and headed to the Catskills resort, hardly looking like typical patrons of the sedate, pastoral enclave. They walked up to the front desk, bearded, longhaired Feldman in cut-off jeans, Goldstein in shades and Hawaiian shirt, lanky Gottehrer looming behind them. The clerk took one look and said, “You must be looking for the Berns party.”
They interrupted his dinner. The only place in the hotel they could find that had a phonograph player was the dance studio and it was locked. They broke in and played him the acetate on a portable phonograph. “That’s my record,” Berns said. “I want it.”
Some cosmic movement in the rock and roll universe was bringing Berns’s “My Girl Sloopy” back to life. Not only did the McCoys take the song number one on Bang Records in October, the label’s first number one hit after less than six months in business, at the same time in England, the Yardbirds included a lengthy workout on the song on the band’s first U.S. album.
From north of the border, Little Caesar and the Consuls, kings of Ontario rock and roll, recorded their slowed down, parenthetic “(My Girl) Sloopy” on Canada’s Red Leaf Records, released in the United States the week before the McCoys single. Their version of “Sloopy” went number one in Canada, but made it only halfway up the Hot 100 in this country, where the band turned down offers to tour and appear on
American Bandstand
because all but one of the members had full-time jobs in Toronto.
Surf rock duo Jan and Dean included a version on their new
Folk ’n Roll
album. Hot on the heels of the McCoys hit, jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis, who made the hit parade that summer with an instrumental
version of the r&b hit “The ‘In’ Crowd,” was back on the charts with his “Hang On Sloopy.” Berns and Farrell even made a reluctant Gil Hamilton—as Johnny Thunder—do “Everybody Do the Sloopy,” which they put out on Diamond Records. By November, there were fifteen recorded versions of “Sloopy.” The Dave Clark Five never got around to recording the song.
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The B-side of the single, “I’m on Fire,” was recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis as his last rock and roll record before going over to country and western music.
Arif Mardin, Ben E. King, George Treadwell, Ahmet Ertegun, Bert Berns
B
ERT BERNS’S SON,
Brett Ben David Berns, was born on March 30, 1965. Jerry Wexler was the godfather. Bert’s twenty-three-year-old bride was so unprepared for motherhood, his secretary had to be dispatched to buy the crib, the baby furniture, and all the rest before mother and child came home from the hospital. The birth of a grandchild brought no greater rapprochement with Berns’s mother, who would infuriate her young daughter-in-law by showing up at the penthouse for Sunday dinner with her own food. Ilene took the baby to the park every day in his fancy English pram, the Rolls-Royce of baby carriages, and made her husband’s dinner every night. Berns stopped on his way home at the butcher shop to pick up the bones and meat scraps that went into the Great Dane’s nightly gluttony. His wife was not welcome at the office, but the dog was.
The world of rhythm and blues was changing and Motown Records was at the center of it. They were provong that rhythm and blues records oriented toward young whites could top the charts and that properly groomed and cultivated r&b acts such as the Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, and others could be acceptable on the broadest levels of mainstream America. At the same time, Motown’s acts and their records maintained enough authentic connection to the urban experience that they remained believable in the nation’s black
communities, where the mood was definitely darkening. The Motown acts represented the triumph of assimilation, the aspiration of integration, an ideal suddenly, surprisingly, coming under question. Rioters in the streets of Watts that summer appropriated the trademark cry of r&b disc jockey the Magnificent Montague when he especially liked a record, “Burn, baby, burn.”
Soul was the word. Sam Cooke, shot to death in a seedy South Central Los Angeles motel in December 1964, moved strongly into the modern realm on his crowning posthumous single, the rousing, blaring big band blast of “Shake” that smelled richly of Memphis funk, and “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the plaintive gospel cry that managed to articulate much of the deeper emotions behind the struggle for civil rights as almost pure metaphor. James Brown pledged his fealty to the new order, the announcement of his transformation carried by the very title of his latest hit, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”
At Atlantic, Berns was searching for his own sound on sessions with vocalists Tami Lynn and Wilson Pickett, trying to sail the shifting seas. His latest recordings with Ben E. King took the great vocalist even further into gospel-drenched emotions. These records were stamped with Berns’s musical imprint. He was not jumping on bandwagons or copying already successful ideas so much as following his own natural progression, exploring new variations on the songwriting and production style he had been developing over the past four years, which, under Wexler’s beneficent guardianship, was blooming with considerable magnificence.
Wilson Pickett made every kind of record a rhythm and blues artist could have over a career spanning more than four decades, but he never made another record like “Come Home Baby,” the result of his three-song December 1964 session with Berns. Pickett had found a home on Atlantic by a circuitous route. He never earned a penny from “If You Need Me.” Atlantic’s Berns production of Solomon Burke buried Pickett’s version, even though Burke and Pickett always admired
one another and wound up performing the song together on concert stages occasionally.
Pickett, who spent more time picking cotton than going to school growing up in Alabama, began his career in gospel. He was singing both gospel with the Spiritual Five and secular music with the Falcons in Detroit, where he had moved at age sixteen to live with his auto worker father, when the Falcons’ “I Found a Love” written and sung by Pickett, took off on the charts in 1962. He signed with Atlantic in early 1964 after Lloyd Price and Harold Logan were through with him. He produced his own first single for the label, a collaboration with songwriter Don Covay, “I’m Gonna Cry,” that did nothing.
Instead of his customary gospel chorus on “Come Home Baby,” Berns paired Pickett with the sole female voice of Tami Lynn, whose guttural growl rolls right into the foreground alongside Pickett’s more mannered vocal, starting with a snaking
Ooh, yeah
inserted between the first two couplets over the introduction. The dialogue between the two vocalists takes hold on the chorus, while the horn section builds behind them, giving the production the grandeur of a Phil Spector record without the murkiness. Every detail of Teacho Wiltshire’s arrangement—the spare verse accompaniment, the brassy crescendos, the muted trombone on the instrumental bridge—is in the front of the production. Pickett, unlike most lead vocalists on Berns productions, sounds slightly remote from the emotional content of the Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil song, reluctant to fully commit, but with the background vocalist singing rings around him on the chorus, literally, his reliance on a cool professionalism seems judicious. Wexler was astonished to find the session cost an astronomical $6,000, but he had to agree the record was beautiful. It never even charted.
Berns had already taken an interest in the Tami Lynn case, after Wexler signed the twenty-two-year-old jazz vocalist from New Orleans. Trumpeter Melvin Lastie, who was working with Latin bandleader Willie Bobo, had brought her to Wexler. Lastie knew Lynn from New
Orleans, where he and Harold Battiste started AFO, the sidemen’s collective that produced the Barbara George hit, “I Know.” Lynn started singing outside church as a teenager in New Orleans because the regular vocalist in the Alvin “Red” Tyler band didn’t show up for a gig one night at a bar next door to where her aunt lived.
Lynn quickly became the favored younger sister to the group and they cut her singing a jazzy version of “Mojo Hannah” that Wexler heard her do at a disc jockey convention in St. Louis. When Wexler approached her about making records, she told him that she had other plans. “I’m going to be a speech therapist for retarded children,” she said.
Two years later, she had moved to New York, where her father had always lived, and was singing jazz, opening for John Coltrane at Birdland, when Lastie brought her to Atlantic.
She stayed in the spare bedroom at the Bernses’ apartment for several days. Lynn and Ilene were about the same age. They made dinner together and chattered. Berns played her dozens of records and acetates, trying to find material that she wanted to sing. He wanted her to pick the songs.
She selected a number written by Berns, “I’m Gonna Run Away from You”—a piece that recalled his 1963 record with the Wanderers, “You Can’t Run Away from Me”—largely because she never heard anything like it. This exquisite record disappeared without a trace when it came out, also largely because nobody ever heard anything like it.
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Songwriting was credited to Bert Berns, who started using that name instead of Bert Russell on his Web IV tunes, becoming just that much more his own man.
He also parked British session guitarist Jimmy Page in his spare bedroom on Page’s first visit to New York. Page was stopping over at Berns’s invitation on his way to Los Angeles, where he was romantically involved with songwriter/singer Jackie DeShannon (Berns cut
a song Page and DeShannon wrote together with Barbara Lewis). He introduced Page to Ahmet and Wexler and took him to an Atlantic session, where he strummed along uncredited because of the union and immigration.
Berns cut six tracks with Ben E. King on a double session in February, including Artie Resnick and Kenny Young’s gimmicky “The Record (Baby I Love You),” which starts with the singer in a penny arcade recording the song. Berns plays it straight and King sings it to death, but it slipped off the charts after three unspectacular weeks. “Not Now (I’ll Tell You When)” and the Berns-Ragovoy number “Cry No More” were strong records, but they didn’t do any better. In all the fourteen songs Berns produced with King, nothing ever clicked. There were great records such as “Let the Water Run Down” or “That’s When It Hurts,” but Berns put King in such torment and despair, the singer could barely be recognized as the genial baritone of his previous singles from the Leiber and Stoller days.