Here Comes the Night (18 page)

They formed Elvis Presley Music and made certain that any material Presley recorded was published by them. Jean Aberbach was a severe taskmaster and harsh disciplinarian. His brother Julian was more informal, but both were old-world European gentlemen who still spoke in thick Austrian accents. Under their strict, merciless control
from virtually the very start, they developed Elvis Presley into the biggest money machine the Broadway music business ever saw. They kept teams of writers squirrelled away turning out enough dreck for two Elvis movies a year.

Leiber and Stoller were also a daily presence in the Hill & Range offices. They knew their brand of satiric social comedies that worked so well with the Coasters would never serve the Drifters, who specialized in romantic fantasies, so the producers looked elsewhere for material. Pomus and Shuman loved the group since they were the Five Crowns. Their song “(If You Cry) True Love, True Love” was slated to be the A-side on the next Drifters single, following the group’s million-selling breakthrough, “There Goes My Baby.” The other side was another song written by Benny Nelson (Ben E. King) and owned by Drifters manager George Treadwell. King sang the lead on his song, but lead tenor Johnny Lee Williams was brought in to do “(If You Cry) True Love, True Love.” Mike Stoller knew arranger Stan Applebaum because they were both students of avant-garde classical composer Stefan Wolpe, and between them, they built a sumptuous, soaring carpet of sound, littered with tinkling, glistening percussion—bells, triangles, gourds, shakers. King Curtis played the sax break. These men were making records that sounded like no records ever did. They were lustful, ambitious musicians moving into wondrous realms entirely of their own creation.

For “This Magic Moment,” the next Drifters epic, arranger Applebaum posed the Pomus-Shuman song on a whirlwind of strings, producers Leiber and Stoller accenting the arrangement with tympani and softly-strummed acoustic guitars. By the time they all reconvened in May 1960 at Bell Studios to cut “Save the Last Dance for Me” and three other songs, they had elevated the entire art of American popular music.

Leiber and Stoller moved up from their Fifty-Seventh Street offices to a ninth-floor Brill Building suite in January 1961. They started their
own publishing company, Trio Music, and another company, Tiger Records, that was a partnership with Atlantic Records and Hill & Range, in addition to Quintet Music, where Hill & Range was already partners. Hill & Range had different pieces of so many Leiber and Stoller songs, only Mike Stoller could remember them all.

They were both permanently located now in New York City. Leiber was married in 1958 to actress Gaby Rodgers, whose father was an old-line Manhattan blue blood art dealer, and they had two sons. They lived in a sumptuous eleven-room apartment at the Langham on Central Park West. Acting coach Lee Strasberg lived on the top floor and Leiber used to see Marilyn Monroe in the elevator. Rodgers introduced Leiber to off-Broadway theater and the New York art world and they socialized with artists such as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Larry Rivers.

Stoller and his accountant wife, Meryl, lived in a brownstone on Seventeenth Street with their daughter and two sons. He grew a goatee and carried a rolled-up umbrella with him wherever he went. Stoller, who studied classical composition with twelve-tone specialist Wolpe, even had one of his egghead pieces performed at the Ninety-Second Street Y. They were kings of Broadway in three-piece suits and cashmere socks.

They sometimes liked to write in the imposing surroundings of the Hill & Range office, amid all the garish modern art. But they were gravitating away from songwriting toward record production and music publishing. They continued to make Coasters’ records, but the group had slipped from popularity. The records, if anything, were even more refined and sharply tuned social commentary.

“Run Red Run” told the tale of a fellow who taught his pet chimpanzee to speak and play cards, only to have the ape catch him cheating and pull a gun on him. “You made a man out of me,” he tells the song’s protagonist, “now I’m going to make a monkey out of you.” The other side, “What about Us,” was undisguised Marxist rhetoric about
class warfare, posed as broad stroke
Amos ’n’ Andy
blackface comedy, originally recorded at the same 1959 session as the hit “Poison Ivy,” their sly take on VD. (“Sexy,” less sly, from an earlier 1958 session that also produced million-seller “Charlie Brown,” had gone entirely unreleased.)

The 1960 Coasters release “Shoppin’ for Clothes” was a hilarious monologue, brilliantly delivered, a minor masterpiece and house favorite at Atlantic that spent only two weeks on the charts and turned out to have been lifted straight from a little-known record on a small-time label by some nobody. Leiber and Stoller undermined the poor sucker’s lawsuit, when the flagrant copyright infringement was brought to their attention, by buying the publishing company that owned the rights. Their exquisite “Little Egypt” restored some of the group’s chart luster in spring 1961. “Girls, Girls, Girls,” recorded at the same session, didn’t do much for the Coasters, but Elvis picked it up the next year as title track to one of his cinematic epics.

When Leiber and Stoller’s accountants recommended an audit of Atlantic Records, Stoller, married to a former accountant, thought the audit was simply good business, but Leiber suspected it meant trouble. Wexler never liked the idea of the audit. Leiber and Stoller had been making a fortune from their association with Atlantic. Of course, Leiber and Stoller’s remodel of the Drifters franchise saved the label in 1960 after Atlantic lost Ray Charles to the greener pastures, long greener, of ABC-Paramount Records. When the audit showed Atlantic owed Leiber and Stoller $18,000, Wexler went nuts. He screamed at them. He called them names. He told them they could have their money, but they would never work with Atlantic acts again. Leiber said no problem, keep the money. “I’m going to teach you a lesson,” Wexler told them. “Not only are you not going to get the money, but you’re not going to work with our artists again either.”

While he couldn’t afford to cut all his ties with the successful producers, Wexler never forgave them and would have as little as possible
to do with them after that. Leiber and Stoller were going to have to expand their horizons beyond Atlantic if they wanted to continue to thrive as record producers, which had proved a key ingredient in their publishing success.

Art Talmadge came from Chicago, where he ran grubby Mercury Records, tasteless traders in such
pop ordinaire
as the Crew Cuts and Georgia Gibbs. A long way from the urbane, witty, and hip Atlantic chiefs who brought Leiber and Stoller into the business, Talmadge was a dull curmudgeon who took over the United Artists operation the previous year and was paying the rent with piano bar duo Ferrante and Teicher (“Theme from ‘Exodus’”) and a flukey folk hit, “Michael (Row the Boat Ashore)” by the Highwaymen.

Their attorney Lee Eastman negotiated a cute deal for Leiber and Stoller with the label that,
Billboard
speculated, could pay a producer’s royalty of two to three cents a side. But the United Artists roster was also a long way from Atlantic. Leiber and Stoller, who hadn’t worked with many white acts other than Elvis, found themselves making records with distinctly B-grade talents such as the has-been Johnnie Ray, a would-be teen idol named Kenny Chandler, and former
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts
winners the Shepherd Sisters five years after their hit “Alone.”

They found Jay and the Americans at an audition. Vocalist John Traynor, who left the Mystics after “Hushabye,” hooked up with some other scuffling Brooklyn vocalists from a group called the Harbor Lights and, after a couple of nowhere singles, wound up trying out for Leiber and Stoller. Jerry Leiber gave the group a new name. With his eye on an American Airlines ticket on his desk, he suggested Binky Jones and the Americans. Traynor, not wanting to be known as Binky Jones, perhaps understandably, offered his own nickname as a compromise and Jay and the Americans were born.

With the movie version of
West Side Story
due to be released—a return engagement on Broadway had been running across the street at
the Winter Garden for more than a year—they made a
baion
version of the show’s hit ballad, “Tonight,” as the first United Artists single by Jay and the Americans. The record never made the charts, although it got quite a lot of airplay around New York City.

When they went back into Bell Studios with the Drifters in February 1961 to follow up the number one success of “Save the Last Dance for Me” for Atlantic, producers Leiber and Stoller took two new songs from Pomus and Shuman, “Sweets for My Sweet” and “Roomful of Tears,” along with songs from two teams they had never used before. “(Don’t Go) Please Stay” came from Bob Hilliard and Burt Bacharach at Famous Music, a pair of professional songwriters who had both been around a while, still waiting for their big break. “Some Kind of Wonderful,” on the other hand, was written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, the husband-wife team whose first hit, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” for the Shirelles, was riding the top of the charts that week.

LEADING THE CHARGE
on the Brill Building aristocracy was an upstart publishing company out of 1650 Broadway that was on the verge of emerging as the top commercial force in American pop music. Teenage mom Carole King came to work every morning at Aldon Music, pushing a baby stroller with her one-year-old daughter, Lou Lou. After “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” hit, her husband quit his job at the chemical plant and drove away in a limousine. The whole enterprise was taking off. Aldon Music, a young pup teen pop factory, was hotter than any of the carriage trade publishers in the Brill Building.

Twenty-seven-year-old Don Kirshner had built a bustling hive and was making honey. His partner, Al Nevins, an older, more experienced music business professional, came from another era. He had belonged to a successful instrumental recording group since 1939 called the Three Suns, who made easy listening records for RCA Victor. He wrote the Platters hit “Twilight Time.” In 1958, he and Kirshner had started Aldon—taking the title from their first names. Before that, Kirshner had
been an amateur, pushing songs he wrote with a friend he first met at a drugstore in Washington Heights before he changed his name to Bobby Darin and finally launched his own singing career with “Splish Splash.”

The first Aldon writers, Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield, had simply shown up at the office Kirshner and Nevins opened at 1650 Broadway in 1958. They signed Sedaka and Greenfield to long-term exclusive contracts the next day. Sedaka was a classical piano student on a scholarship at Juilliard. Greenfield ran errands for National Cash Register. Kirshner took them to Connie Francis, whom he had first met pitching her songs with Bobby Darin. She was looking for material to follow her first hit record, “Who’s Sorry Now,” and she found their song “Stupid Cupid” a cutesy rock and roll novelty that qualified as a left-field move for the girl singer. When Sedaka made the charts himself later the same year with their song “The Diary,” which was supposed to have been the next single by Little Anthony and the Imperials, Aldon was off to the races.

By 1961, Kirshner had eighteen writers, all between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six. On Fridays, they demonstrated their best song of the week in front of one another on the red piano in his office. A competitive spirit prevailed. A songwriter coming back from lunch might hear the same set of chords he’d been working on all morning now coming out of another cubicle. Kirshner had boundless energy, enthusiasm, and a golden ear for a hit tune. Not satisfied with the measly two cents from every record sale the publisher was forced to share with the writer, Kirshner had expanded the services of Aldon into talent management and independent record production.

He signed Goffin and King’s sixteen-year-old Aldon demo singer, Tony Orlando, to Epic Records, and he and Nevins supervised his recording of Goffin and King’s “Halfway to Paradise,” which sailed up the charts in May. They had their eyes on another Aldon song for the follow-up by writers Barry Mann and Larry Kolber, “I Love How You Love Me,” but
enfant terrible
Phil Spector also wanted the song.

Spector had come to Aldon in June when he wanted material for Gene Pitney, even though Pitney was managed by the label owner, Aaron Schroeder, a songwriter and music publisher himself. Customarily, Schroeder would have been very protective of his own copyrights—he turned down Ozzie Nelson, who wanted a piece of the Gene Pitney song “Hello Mary Lou,” before he would let Ozzie’s son Ricky record the number (which Ricky went ahead and recorded anyway).

As a songwriter, he had more than twenty Presley titles. Schroeder was the king of Elvis Presley B-sides, not so much because of his songwriting skill as his willingness to kick back a hefty chunk of his royalties to Freddy Bienstock at Hill & Range, who really didn’t care what was on the other side of Presley singles. It was a free ride; the B-sides earned the same amount as the hits. As a music publisher, Schroeder bought Dick Clark’s Sea-Lark Music at a fire sale price when Clark was called before Congress to testify in the payola investigation.

Schroeder practically started Musicor Records to release Pitney recordings, and their first single did respectably. But the second didn’t even chart. Pitney’s record career was on the line. Schroeder had a feeling about this crazy kid Spector, dressed in capes, his long hair over his collar. He ceded to Spector on all fronts, including going to Aldon for material. Pitney met Spector only once before their epic session, over lunch at the House of Chan, a Chinese place on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Third Street. “My sister’s in an asylum,” he told Pitney, “and she’s the sane one in the family.”

All of Broadway crowded into the control booth that night at Bell Sound to watch the boy wonder record Pitney singing the Goffin and King song “Every Breath I Take.” The studio was stuffed with players, tympani, horn and string sections. Surrounding Spector behind the board as the session progressed were Leiber and Stoller, songwriters Goffin and King, fellow Aldon writers Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, songwriter Burt Bacharach, Donny Kirshner, Aaron Schroeder, and his associate, Wally Gold.