Here Comes the Night (12 page)
Berns managed to ingratiate himself with Russ Miller, who worked next door as office manager for Robert Mellin Music. Bobby Mellin was an old-time music publisher who wrote some pretty big records for the Ames Brothers and ran his own publishing company. He spent most of his time conducting the operation from England. Berns wanted to write songs, but it wasn’t clear he knew how. Miller knew Berns would make a great song plugger. It didn’t matter how the songwriting turned out. Berns had the perfect enthusiasm for a pitchman to represent the firm’s songs to other music business characters. He gave Berns a job at $50 a week (and $50 in expenses) and signed him to a contract on February 12, 1960. It was now official; Bert Berns was in the music business. His career had begun.
In moving into the Broadway music world, Berns was stepping into a fierce game already underway. At the advanced age of thirty, he would be little more than a novice among men who had invented the game he was going to play. These were unscrupulous pirates who had already made off with much of the hit parade, once thought impregnable, from big, established companies with far greater resources. They did this through ingenuity, perspicacity, hard work, and sheer ruthlessness that the more genteel, polite ends of the music business couldn’t match. These were hard men, playing tough, as Berns was about to learn. It was the dirty business of rhythm and blues.
*
On the other hand, Thiele did score on the hit parade by the end of the year with an incredibly stupid number, “Uh! Oh!” by the Nutty Squirrels, which sold damn near a million records and was nothing more than a couple of old jazz duffers speeding up their vocals until they sound like chipmunks scat-singing. Maybe “The Gettysburg Address” wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Jerry Wexler, Ahmet Ertegun, Miriam Abramson, 1955
H
ERB ABRAMSON CAME
back from the Army to a different Atlantic Records in April 1955. Wexler now worked side by side with Ahmet, in the desk where Abramson used to sit. Jerry was opinionated, pushy, temperamental, a perfect partner for passive-aggressive Ahmet, and they were on fire on the charts. “Flip Flop and Fly” by Big Joe Turner was number two R&B and “I Got a Woman” by Ray Charles was racing up the r&b charts to number one. Ahmet and Jerry were the team now and Jerry didn’t particularly like Abramson.
Abramson’s wife, Miriam, ran the business end of the operation. She was a caustic hard-boiled dame with a mouth on her, who shared Wexler’s zeal for protecting the Atlantic bank account. To complicate matters further, Abramson turned up with his pregnant German girlfriend, whom he wanted to marry.
Miriam Abramson took the Atlantic stock in their divorce settlement. She and Herb had a three-year-old son together and the split was bitter. They still worked at Atlantic, Herb in an office on one side of the main room and Ahmet and Jerry in an office off the opposite side of the room. In August 1955, Atlantic bowed a new label, Atco Records, and placed Herb in charge. Abramson was increasingly being marginalized in the company he founded.
Ahmet also wanted to bring his brother Nesuhi into the company. Nesuhi was still living in Los Angeles—although no longer married to the lady who owned the record store—and he had been offered a post with one of Atlantic’s chief competitors, Hollywood-based Imperial Records, recording home of Fats Domino and other New Orleans rhythm and blues artists. The Atlantic partners could not allow Ahmet’s brother to go to work for the other side, especially Imperial owner Lew Chudd, who was a favorite target of inveterate practical joker Ahmet. He delighted in torturing the largely humorless Chudd, for instance, phoning him and pretending to be one “Chester” Domino, uncle of Fats, asking about royalties and suggesting he stop by the office for “a little taste.”
Nesuhi was impressive—fluent in several languages yet thoroughly conversant in slangy jazz talk, he had studied at the Sorbonne, lived in the same building as Sartre, broken bread with Camus. He had launched a nationwide traditional jazz revival when, at the request of coast-to-coast radio show host Orson Welles, he threw together a bunch of the old New Orleans men around trombonist Kid Ory. He taught the first university course on the history of jazz at UCLA.
They all kicked in stock to bring Nesuhi into the partnership, even though Abramson and Nesuhi didn’t really like each other. The cultured, suave Nesuhi Ertegun joined his younger brother’s growing concern at a propitious time. Under Nesuhi’s supervision, Atlantic developed a strong jazz program that, right from the start, spanned the traditional Dixieland jazz of Wilbur De Paris to fresh, contemporary fare such as the Modern Jazz Quartet. He moved Atlantic strongly into the rapidly growing market for long-playing albums. Atlantic albums were quality products that came in sturdy cardboard with glossy covers, with intelligent liner notes and discographical recording details, nicer pieces than even the majors were turning out.
It was Nesuhi who found Leiber and Stoller, the songwriters who would lead Atlantic into new vistas. When Jerry Wexler heard the regional hit by the Colts, Los Angeles City College students who were
handled by the Platters’ manager, Buck Ram, he immediately recognized the song, “Adorable,” as perfect fodder for the new lineup of the Drifters. Lead vocalist Clyde McPhatter had been drafted in May 1954 and the once-productive franchise had been lying fallow for more than a year. In a rush to beat the smaller label to the national market, Wexler asked Nesuhi Ertegun to conduct a session with the Drifters in Los Angeles, where the group was touring and Nesuhi had been living for ten years. Wexler told him to record “Adorable” and whatever the hell else he wanted.
Nesuhi first met songwriter Jerry Leiber shooting pool in the basement at USC law student Jimmy Tolbert’s house. Tolbert was a nephew of Lester Young, and the jazz crowd hung out at his parties. Leiber and Stoller spent a lot of time at Jimmy Tolbert’s, where they both met their black girlfriends. Leiber and his songwriting partner Mike Stoller were semicelebrated in South Central at the time as the white cats who wrote r&b songs for Charles Brown, Jimmy Witherspoon, and Amos Milburn. Their song “Hound Dog” had been one of the biggest r&b records of 1953 for Big Mama Thornton. They were currently operating their own record label, Spark Records, out of a Melrose Avenue storefront, writing and producing brilliant records, such as the comic blues “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” by the Robins. Nesuhi knew Leiber and invited him to join him as a tennis partner on his forthcoming honeymoon, as he was getting married for the second time. Leiber went along and played tennis with Nesuhi every day, while his bride sat by the pool.
Not only did Nesuhi include Leiber and Stoller’s “Ruby Baby” among the five songs he recorded with the Drifters during his three-hour session at Los Angeles’ Modern Records, but he convinced them to fold their label and come to work for Atlantic Records. The Spark label never had any distribution outside the West Coast, and although some of the records made a little noise, none ever sold truly well. The label was an uneasy partnership between the songwriters, a music business professional named Lester Sill, and Stoller’s nervous investor father.
(Wexler proved astute in his judgment about “Adorable.” The record was a Top Five
Billboard
R&B hit for the Drifters, the crucial first single by the group after the departure of the popular lead vocalist McPhatter, introducing lead tenor Johnny Moore, who was to have an illustrious career with the band. In fact, three of the five songs produced by Nesuhi Ertegun in the September 19, 1955, session made the charts.)
In November 1955, Leiber and Stoller signed a deal with Atlantic Records to sell the Spark masters and continue to produce records for Atlantic, the first independent production deal in the business. The Atco rerelease of “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” the final Spark record by the Robins, sold 250,000 copies, instead of 90,000. Leiber and Stoller were so jazzed, they hung a sign in their office reading WEST COAST DIVISION, ATLANTIC, ATCO AND CAT RECORDS.
With “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” Leiber and Stoller had come into their own as the preeminent composers of rhythm and blues. They were inventing the language and sound of the music, the basic vocabulary, the artistic palette. These two twenty-two-year-olds were in full bloom as a creative team and they were about to be swept to the top of their world by forces beyond their imagination.
“Smokey Joe’s Cafe” introduced what Leiber liked to call “audio playlets,” although “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” the previous year already owed as much to the radio drama
Gang Busters
as it did Muddy Waters. With Leiber’s ear for dialect and the expert comic timing of the experienced vocal group, enforced by scrupulous rehearsals conducted by Leiber and Stoller, the record captured a rich cartoonish atmosphere in vivid sound pictures, tied together by a ribbon of piano from Mike Stoller, a kind of street talk mini-opera told in three acts and nine couplets.
Leiber’s widowed mother had run stores in black neighborhoods, first in Baltimore, then Los Angeles. Leiber had grown up at ease around that culture. He was short, stocky, and extravagantly verbal and had one brown eye and one blue eye. Stoller’s mother was a
former model and Broadway actress who dated George Gershwin and descended into a lifetime of melancholia as a housewife in Queens. Stoller took stride piano lessons from James P. Johnson, Fats Waller’s teacher, and ran around the jazz clubs of Manhattan before his family moved to Los Angeles when he was sixteen. He was attending Los Angeles City College in 1950 when Leiber contacted him about writing songs after getting his number from a mutual acquaintance. Stoller was not impressed until Leiber showed up at his house with notebooks full of lyrics. Stoller saw all the ditto marks and realized this crazy kid, three weeks his junior, was writing blues.
In April 1956, Mike Stoller took the first sizable royalty check he ever received, moved out of the apartment he shared with his wife of one year, Meryl, and put their belongings in storage, and they headed off to Europe for a three-month tour. One of the highlights was hearing the great Edith Piaf in her concert at the Olympia in Paris introduce their “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”—the big hit Stateside by a tight, bright, white vocal group on Capitol Records called the Cheers that paid for the European trip.
On the return home, they booked passage on the
Andrea Doria
, an Italian ocean liner that sank in the dark seas off Nantucket on July 25, 1956, the night before it was supposed to dock in New York City, after ramming an outbound Scandinavian ship. More than sixteen hundred passengers and crew were rescued and forty-six people died. The Stollers’ lifeboat was picked up by a United Fruit steamer. Lester Sill and Jerry Leiber took a cab to the pier where the boat was docking. Leiber brought a silk suit, assuming Stoller would be wet and need dry clothes. But Leiber was excited about news that couldn’t wait—he blurted out they had a big hit record. The old Big Mama Thornton hit, “Hound Dog,” had been recorded by Elvis Presley, he told Stoller.
“Elvis who?” said Stoller.
So rapid had been the ascension of Elvis Presley that Stoller had missed it in its entirety during his three months tooling around Europe.
Presley’s first RCA Victor single, “Heartbreak Hotel,” hit number one only a month before. “Hound Dog,” the second single, was streaking up the charts as they were fishing Stoller out of the drink.
*
They had two records looming high on the charts—“Hound Dog” and “Down in Mexico,” the first Leiber-Stoller record with the Coasters, the new edition of the Robins, who split in two after Leiber and Stoller went to Atlantic. One set of members stayed with the group’s manager and kept the name, the Robins. Lead vocalist Carl Gardner and bass vocalist Bobby Nunn put together a new group, managed by Lester Sill, and called themselves the Coasters, to underline the group’s association with the West Coast. “Down in Mexico” was another satiric set piece, a comedic travelogue loping along a slinky Latin beat Stoller copped from playing with
pachuco
bands when he first hit L.A.
