Here Comes the Night (20 page)

Encouraged by his aunt, who operated A.V. Berkley Funeral Home in Philadelphia, Burke went to mortuary school, earned his doctorate, and joined the family business. He married and started a family. After several years, he made a couple of small singles for a local Philadelphia label. The Atlantic brass all knew Burke through the Apollo singles, and
Billboard
editor Paul Ackerman, Wexler’s old boss, kept bugging Wexler to sign him. He was an obvious candidate for the Atlantic treatment. When Burke dropped by the Atlantic office in New York unannounced, Wexler signed him to the label on the spot with a handshake. To Atlantic Records, Solomon Burke was deliverance.

When Wexler took Solomon Burke into the studio in December 1960 for his first Atlantic session, Wexler had been missing in action for a while. He rarely faced record production without a partner, but he and Ertegun were no longer as close as they had been. He cut three songs with Burke that day. Two were unremarkable and those were the two Wexler chose for Burke’s first Atlantic single, which quickly came and went. The third song was a country and western number that Burke’s champion and Wexler’s mentor Paul Ackerman suggested, “Just Out of Reach,” a song previously done by Patsy Cline on Four Star in 1958.

(At the session, Solomon Burke didn’t even stay long enough to hear the playbacks. With a heavy blizzard slamming the East Coast, Burke, an always-enterprising father of eight, was in a hurry to return to Philadelphia, where he had a $4-an-hour job shoveling snow waiting for him.)

Rhythm and blues singers did not often attempt country and western material, but there was more common ground between the two audiences than most people realized. Southern blacks often grew up with a love for country music, but singing it in public was a different matter. Burke’s plaintive tenor sailed over a pillowy cushion provided by a background chorale that gave the record a distinctly white touch, although nothing Solomon Burke sang was ever likely to be mistaken for pop.

The record took an agonizing eight months to break. Released in February, it finally climbed on the charts in September 1961 after it started to pick up a little airplay on the radio chain owned by former cowboy singer turned broadcast mogul Gene Autry, who happened to own the publishing on the tune. A lone wolf promotion man working the record for $50 a week blew on the ember. By the time the record fully caught fire and burned, Atlantic was selling thirty thousand copies a week.

But Atlantic had been having a tough time coming up with any hit records. The rhythm and blues style the label helped invent was ancient history. The company denied reports the label had been sold when
Billboard
called, but admitted they were talking to several possible suitors. It was stretching into a long drought. Atlantic’s three best-selling singles in 1962 weren’t even records they made. One of them Wexler didn’t even know they owned.

From the newly renamed, already affiliated little Memphis label, Satellite, which was now called Stax Records, came the miracle instrumental “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the M.G.’s. “Alley Cat” was a perky, cloying piano piece from the man who owned the company that
distributed Atlantic in Denmark. His name was Bent Fabricius-Bjerre, which Nesuhi shortened to Bent Fabric. The third was “Stranger on the Shore” by Mr. Acker Bilk, a British trad jazz clarinetist in a bowler hat who cut this string-laden easy listening instrumental that broke out as a hit single all over Europe. Wexler, pissed off that he licensed the damn album but had not been given the hit single, called the European record label and complained. He was told the song was already included on the album, under a different title. If he had listened, he could have heard it. But these were not Atlantic kind of records. These were fluke hits the label could not be expected to repeat. With the success of “Just Out of Reach,” Solomon Burke looked like the most promising potential star on Atlantic in many moons. His coming release would be crucial.

Into this breach stepped Bert Berns. He had worked for Mellin Music for almost a year and a half and he had made a lot of records—his Jarmels song had even hit the charts that summer—but Berns was still waiting for his big chance. This was it, producing the next Solomon Burke single under the watchful eye of Jerry Wexler himself. He had no real credentials that would qualify him for the job. Berns and Wexler both knew this was a potentially propitious opportunity, a crossroads for Berns and for Atlantic Records. Burke was a formidable talent, no doubt, but there was much at stake on this session for everybody, especially Berns.

Wexler always said there was something in the way Bert Berns demonstrated the song that led him to take Berns into the studio to produce Solomon Burke. Berns did have an ebullient, enthusiastic manner. He could sing, play guitar and piano, and get inside a song. He could show other musicians how it could go, what you could do with the song. Although Berns was twelve years younger and didn’t grow up poor, Wexler knew who Berns was. Wexler’s father used to clean the windows at the Berns family’s dress shop on the Grand Concourse. Wexler knew the territory. He understood the street corners. That Berns was
talented was obvious. He was an eager puppy, brimming with music and ambition. He had all the musical knowledge Wexler lacked, and in his enthusiasm, he radiated a kind of innocent joy that was the polar opposite of Wex’s cynical cunning.

At his first meeting with Berns, Solomon Burke had hardly been impressed. He took one look at Berns, wearing a strange hairpiece, scraggly hair that extended past his collar, no necktie, and blue jeans, and took Wexler aside. “What’s with this paddy motherfucker?” he said.

Atlantic had installed studios that Tom Dowd designed at the company’s new Sixtieth Street headquarters. The big room was almost fifty feet long, more than thirty feet wide, with fifteen-foot ceilings. The room had been instantly successful. Atlantic, almost alone among New York studios, recorded on modern eight-track machines with one-inch tape. On December 6, 1961, Wexler took Berns to the Atlantic studio to produce Solomon Burke singing his song, “Cry to Me.”

Wexler produced the first two songs that day, indifferent, uneventful ballads that would have been out of date years before (including a listless cover of the 1950 Ivory Joe Hunter hit, “I Almost Lost My Mind,” already twice reprised in 1956 by Ivory Joe for Atlantic and Pat Boone for the big hit). Burke sleepwalked through the vocals. But when Berns’s song took center stage, things started to happen. Wexler had admonished Berns. “Keep him rhythm and blues—don’t go pop with him,” he said.

A descending figure opens the record with a cascading downbeat, sharp little offbeat accents lending the track a calypso feel. Burke opens up in rich voice, and as the lyrics turn and twist their way through the song, he drops down into some of his most golden, resonant tones. But the record doesn’t really take off until Berns gets him crying.

Berns and Burke tangled in the studio over the tempo and Burke won out, taking the song at a faster pace than Berns envisioned. Gary Chester’s drumming propels the song into each verse, building to Burke digging into the repeated line
Don’t you feel like crying
. The question
is rhetorical. The song is actually a proclamation of love, but the lyrics dwell on the pain and despair of loneliness. As a songwriter, Berns is less concerned about continuity than he is prodding his singer into desperation. Burke brings the song to a neat emotional epiphany, adlibbing
cry-ca-cry-ca-cry-cry
over the final chorus.

When you’re waiting for a voice to come

In the night, but there is no one

Don’t you feel like crying

(Cry to me)

Don’t you feel like crying

(Cry to me)

Here I am, honey, come on

Cry to me

—
CRY TO ME (BERT RUSSELL, 1962)

For Berns, 1962 would be a watershed year, starting with the release of Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me” in January 1962. The record would soar to number five on the
Billboard
R&B charts (number forty-four Pop) and ignite Burke’s inexorable ascension into the ranks of the music’s great stars. The record would also be a turning point for Berns, as he sought to capitalize on the success and establish himself in the exclusive inner circle of rhythm and blues.

While his Solomon Burke record started its ten-week run on the charts that January, Berns and his new partner, Wally Roker, were ensconced in the studio, like everybody else in New York, making a twist record. The twist spread through the music business like a virulent flu that winter. Chubby Checker’s 1960 number one hit version of the 1959 Hank Ballard song came back to life like Frankenstein’s monster after Checker performed the song and his subsequent hit, “Let’s Twist Again,” on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in October 1961. More than back from the dead, the song spent three weeks at the top of the charts in January 1962, immediately followed by a three-week run at number
one by “Peppermint Twist” from Joey Dee and the Starliters. The twist had exploded into a major cultural phenomenon. They were twisting in nightclubs all over the world.

The twist swept through the record business in those intoxicating months. Unlike rock and roll, the twist also had an adult constituency. Society bandleader Lester Lanin had a twist record. So did Sinatra (“Everybody’s Twistin’”). No less an authority than Ahmet Ertegun told
Billboard
in February the twist was here to stay. “The Twist is going to be with us for a long time,” he said, “certainly for another year at least.”

Atlantic came up with two albums,
Do the Twist! with Ray Charles
and
Twist with Bobby Darin
, cobbled together from old recordings by the label’s departed stars. Ahmet also announced the introduction of a new label, TwisTime Records, with new releases by the Edwards Twins, the Vocaleers, and the Hi-Lites.

A couple of months later, under a headline “Has the Twist Had It,”
Billboard
noted that Atlantic had quietly folded the label.

Wally Roker first met Berns when he was hanging out with his old Bronx pal, Sid Bernstein, who now worked as a booking agent at Shaw Artists on Fifth Avenue. Roker, a large, genial black man, had kicked around the music business since even before his teenage vocal group, the Heartbeats, hit the charts with “A Thousand Miles Away” in 1956. He had introduced Berns to Luther Dixon (he had also introduced Florence Greenberg to Luther Dixon). He could tell Berns had talent. Roker and Berns formed Lookapoo Productions, a name Roker took from the trademark jive talk of Philly deejay Jocko Henderson, and Roker cut a deal with Capitol Records.

Capitol Records was based in Hollywood, where it was founded by songwriter Johnny Mercer in 1942 and flourished through the fifties with Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and others, who made their records in that sumptuous studio in the basement of the label’s landmark Hollywood skyscraper, built like a stack of records. The Kingston
Trio was currently selling long-players by the millions for the company, but Capitol needed help on the hit parade, especially after the recent Sinatra defection. The East Coast office was assigned the job of building up that end of the label’s business and they had been talking to Roker about working on radio promotion for Capitol, who certainly could use the assistance. The label had success in the pop and country fields, but didn’t know r&b from their elbows. Roker understood his first problem with the new affiliation would be his credibility among the tight little world of rhythm and blues broadcasters, which is how he hit on the idea of George Hudson and the Kings of Twist.

George Hudson’s
Downbeat Club
was the long-standing morning show on Newark’s WNJR, the small station across the river where Alan Freed first staged his assault on the New York market. Hudson was an old-timer, charter member of the r&b station’s first all-black staff in 1953, a figure of repute in the New York market and among other black deejays, although he was certainly no musician, not that that mattered. Berns and Roker took one day to knock out the first George Hudson and the Kings of Twist album,
It’s Twistin’ Time
.

Long-playing albums weren’t staple items in the r&b world of 1962. The game was strictly singles, little records with big holes in the center.
It’s Twistin’ Time
was nothing more than a calling card for deejay Hudson, an opening gambit in a revamped r&b program for Capitol. A simple four-piece band (driven by drummer Gary Chester) and a two-piece horn section featuring King Curtis on tenor sax ran down instrumental versions of a couple of Fats Domino songs, a couple of public domain oldies (“I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” twist-style) and a few specialty numbers, vocals provided by a new kid from Florida, Gil Hamilton. Berns even recut “A Little Bit of Soap” and another new original he wrote with Ray Passman, “Little Twister.” Might as well work the catalog.

The session with the Edsels for Capitol was more serious. The Youngstown, Ohio–based group’s 1958 record on a tiny Little Rock,
Arkansas, label had been unearthed three years later by resourceful deejays, and after licensing the original master to Hy Weiss’s Old Town label, by May 1961, “Rama Lama Ding Dong” was headed up the charts. In the wake of the group’s sudden rescue from oblivion, other old recordings by the Edsels surfaced and the group won a new contract with Capitol Records.

Berns produced the group singing a couple of his songs for Capitol—the single’s B-side “If Your Pillow Could Talk” and the unreleased “Don’t You Feel,” which he wrote with Don Drowty—and a pair of songs from a new songwriter named Jeff Barry, whose “Shake Shake Sherry” was the record’s A-side when it was released in December 1961. A screaming rocker with a scorching saxophone solo from King Curtis—“a wildly rocking disc with a lot of excitement,” said
Billboard
—the record started to break on New York radio in late February, but never spread and then fizzled. But it had looked good for a minute.