Here Comes the Night (22 page)
Berns (top) with Phil Spector (bottom), Jerry Leiber (right), Mike Stoller (left, holding glass), Sam Cooke (next to Leiber), others, BMI Awards dinner, 1962.
If I Didn’t Have a Dime (To Play the Jukebox)
[1962]
B
ERNS WAS ALL
over the place. He went straight from finishing the third George Hudson LP the next day into Atlantic Studios for his second Solomon Burke session with Wexler. Burke, who found Berns’s suggestion he record “A Little Bit of Soap” almost laughable, had sketched out lyrics on the train from Philadelphia to an old folk song he only barely remembered, “Down in the Valley” (the copyright wound up credited to Burke-Berns). Berns also gave him a song he wrote during his earliest days in 1650 Broadway with Mickey Lee Lane, “Baby I Want to Be Loved,” a Don Covay song called “I’m Hanging Up My Heart for You,” and the old folk song Berns himself recorded two years earlier on the flip side of “The Legend of the Alamo,” “Gotta Travel On.”
He cut a second session with Jimmy Jones (“Handy Man”) for Julie Rifkind’s Cub label, including another version of his and Passman’s “Nights of Mexico.” His Lookapoo partner Wally Roker, working a few angles for Capitol, signed saxophone sideman King Curtis as an artist, fresh off his number one r&b instrumental for Bobby Robinson’s Enjoy label earlier in the year, “Soul Twist” (one of the first records to use the term “soul” in the title). Looking ahead to summer and mindful of the surf music from California that had been recently making itself known on the charts, Berns had session guitarist Billy Butler turn up the reverb and cut a fairly typical King Curtis instrumental single
that he called “Beach Party”—this surf music could turn out to be the next twist—before moving on to an album of instrumental versions of country and western songs by the saxophonist. “Beach Party” spent the entire summer on the pop charts.
He conducted a session for Capitol with the Cadillacs, or at least Bobby Ray and the Cadillacs, a late-edition version of the group behind the 1955 oldie “Speedo” that, over the years, had more members than a Mason Lodge. Berns wrote a florid little melodrama set in the bullfight ring, “White Gardenia,” with Brill Building background vocal specialist Carl Spencer. A richly evocative song that owes something musically to Jerry Butler’s “He Don’t Love You” (with a tip of the hat to “Spanish Harlem”), the bogus Spanish ambience hails back to the bullfight music albums from his days in the West Village with Rita Constance. He also finally recorded a version of his all-time favorite song with the Cadillacs, “La Bamba.”
On his third Solomon Burke session in June, during the middle of the two-month chart run by “Down in the Valley,” Berns forged the style that would forever be identified with Solomon Burke. He balanced four pieces of material, each judiciously decorated to frame Burke’s remarkably expressive vocals in the foreground. With a young arranger Berns knew from Philadelphia, Jerry Ragovoy, who had done some records with Frankie Avalon and Fabian, producer Berns marshaled a large session orchestra that included stalwarts such as drummer Gary Chester and pianist Paul Griffin.
“I Really Don’t Want to Know” followed the blueprint laid down by “Just Out of Reach”—a country standard given a stately, extravagant reading by Burke, gently prodded along by pianist Griffin. Another song, “Home in Your Heart,” was gutbucket blues from old hands Winfield Scott and Otis Blackwell, working out of Hill & Range. But it was the other two pieces where Berns staked out his own territory. “Tonight My Heart She Is Crying” floats on a gentle Afro-Cuban
danzon
with xylophone, flute, and a bed of tinkling percussion, as Burke
philosophically laments,
love is a bird that spreads his wings and flies away
. “You Can Make It If You Try” comes straight from the church—pure unvarnished soul music.
The productions are all recognizable Atlantic Records–style r&b, but these records also bring fresh vigor to the sound. Coproducer Wexler could tell. His records never sounded so good. Berns could get his ideas across to the musicians and communicate with Burke. His enthusiasm was contagious. Wexler felt his heart warm to the task of making records again. A beautiful friendship was beginning to bloom.
It also looked as if Berns might be landing the next Gene Pitney single. Berns only had to walk up a couple of flights at 1650 Broadway to show Pitney “If I Didn’t Have a Dime (To Play the Jukebox),” another song he wrote with Phil Medley. He loved Pitney’s records and thought the song would be right for him. He met the singer upstairs in the office of Pitney’s manager, Aaron Schroeder, the kind of bare-knuckles music publisher who would hand out six different exclusives on the same song. Schroeder also ran the label Musicor Records, where Pitney made his records.
Berns sat on a chair, picked at the battered nylon-string acoustic, and played Pitney only the one song. Pitney liked the song, but he was fascinated with the sound Berns got out of the beat-up guitar. He knew the guitar part tied the song together and didn’t think anybody else could get the same sound. He told Berns he would record the song only if Berns played the guitar. That would not be a problem, Berns assured Pitney.
Pitney was poised for stardom. Writing the next hit single for Gene Pitney would have been a big step up for Berns, but that was not going to happen. Berns’s potential pop breakthrough was buried by the sudden emergence of one of the great American songwriting teams of their day from the other side of the record.
Pitney liked the Berns song and didn’t particularly care for the other song, which Schroeder had picked for the session. To Pitney, it
didn’t feel like it had enough words. It had some strange chords and odd time signatures. The Berns song sounded like the hit to Pitney, not “Only Love Can Break a Heart” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, a couple of Famous Music songwriters in their midthirties who had been around a while without really striking gold.
Burt Bacharach was born and raised in Kansas City. His father was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and best-selling expert on menswear and grooming. Young Bacharach studied music under avant-garde classical composer Darius Milhaud, and his first gig after he left the army in World War II was backing pop singer Vic Damone. He worked as an accompanist for a number of old-time show business musical acts—Polly Bergen, Imogene Coca, Georgia Gibbs, the Ames Brothers—before signing with Famous Music as a songwriter in 1956. He was teamed at Famous with lyricist Hal David, and the pair wrote a procession of forgotten B-sides through the late fifties, beginning with “Peggy’s in the Pantry” by Sherry Parsons. Bacharach, handsome like a movie star, made his living as accompanist to aging screen siren Marlene Dietrich, who took the young gentleman to all the great cities of the world. He was the last great, albeit unconsummated, love of her life.
Hal David had been encouraged to pursue songwriting by his older brother Mack David, already a working songwriter himself. The younger David had some success almost immediately after he mustered out from the war and, two years after that, cowrote “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas,” by Vic Damone, one of the biggest hits of 1949. The following year, Frank Sinatra made it big with his “American Beauty Rose,” and Teresa Brewer scored with “Bell Bottom Blues” in 1953.
Bacharach and David managed some modest hits—“The Story of My Life” by Marty Robbins, “Magic Moments” by Perry Como—but both continued to write with other partners. David coauthored “Broken-Hearted Melody” with his collaborator Sherman Edwards that became the biggest hit of her career for Sarah Vaughan in 1959. Leiber and Stoller used a number of songs with the Drifters (“Please Stay,”
“Loneliness or Happiness,” “Mexican Divorce”) that Bacharach wrote with an older cowriter named Bob Hilliard, a nonconformist in beat-up tennis shoes and worn-out windbreaker, considered odd even by Alley standards.
Luther Dixon at Scepter started to work with Bacharach on the Shirelles. He liked a song Bacharach wrote with Hal’s older brother, Mack David, called “I’ll Cherish You” but wanted Mack to rewrite the lyrics into something darker. Dixon came up with the
cheat . . . cheat
line and the new title, “Baby It’s You,” and took a songwriting credit under his ASCAP pseudonym of Barney Williams. Dixon liked the song so well, in fact, once the new lyrics were finished, he simply overdubbed the Shirelles vocals on top of Bacharach’s original demo.
Bacharach and David liked to fool around on the “Stardust” piano at Famous Music, where Hoagy Carmichael loomed large. Since Paramount Pictures owned the music publisher, songs by Famous writers were frequently funneled into motion pictures (which is how Bacharach ended up writing and recording the theme song to the 1958 science fiction quickie,
The Blob
). They wrote “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” for the John Wayne film directed by John Ford. After Pitney’s searing vocal performance on “Town Without Pity” that not only took the record Top Twenty, but also earned the song an Oscar nod for Hollywood soundtrack composer Dimitri Tiomkin, he was the obvious candidate to sing “Liberty Valance.” By the time Pitney was in Bell Studios recording the song, however, the movie had already been released without it. Still, Hal David’s gem-cut lyrics were a detailed three-minute reduction of the movie’s plot, and Bacharach’s thunderous underpinnings gave Pitney some explosive lines (The
point of a gun was the only law that Liberty understood
. . . ).
The record was well on its way into the Top Five and Pitney was going to have two straight hits when the next session was called that June at Bell. Berns was on hand to play his Goya on the track. Bacharach was there to conduct his arrangement of his song. It was going to be
either “If I Didn’t Have a Dime (To Play the Jukebox)” or “Only Love Can Break a Heart.”
When it was released in September, trade advertisements trumpeted “If I Didn’t Have a Dime” as the A-side of the new Gene Pitney single and the song entered the charts. “Twist and Shout” was still lodged in the upper reaches of the charts. The King Curtis single “Beach Party” hadn’t finished its summer run, so that when the new Solomon Burke single “I Really Don’t Want to Know” made its chart debut the next week, Berns had four records on the
Billboard Hot 100
.
The next week, however, the other side of the Gene Pitney record, Bacharach and David’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart,” started up the charts and didn’t stop until it made number two. “If I Didn’t Have a Dime” stalled at number fifty-eight and fell by the wayside. The Bacharach side was blocked from the top only by Phil Spector’s first number one hit, “He’s a Rebel” by the Crystals, recorded in Hollywood, where he was running his Philles Records label; ironically, a song written by Gene Pitney.
Money was starting to roll in. Berns took Wally Roker with him the day he rented his penthouse. The doorman building was at 301 East Forty-Eighth Street at Second Avenue, a block from United Nations Plaza and the East River. It was a sumptuous perch by any Manhattan measure—a three-bedroom aerie thirty-four floors high, surrounded by terraces on three sides—and it required a royal $700 monthly rent. Berns brought $10,000 in cash with him when he made the deal. There were fireplaces in both the living room and bedroom. He put a grand piano in front of the window. He kept a fishbowl on a side table in the living room where he stuffed royalty checks he was too busy to take to the bank.
Through Ray Passman, Berns met Paul Colby, recently divorced man-about-town who lived in the same East Side neighborhood. Colby worked in the music publishing business during the forties, where he became close friends with Frank Sinatra. Colby used to beard for
Sinatra with Ava Gardner when Sinatra was still married to his first wife. He took dames up to Sinatra’s rooms at the Drake Hotel when Sinatra was out of town. He left the music business to get married and started making furniture. He built rough-hewn, handmade tables for Duke Ellington and Cy Coleman. Miles Davis bought furniture from Colby and became a friend. Morris Levy was a client, and as usual, he proved more trouble than he was worth. Levy loaned Colby $25,000, and when he unexpectedly called in the loan, Colby was forced to close his showroom.
His business—and marriage—over, Colby was making a living restoring antique elevator cabs when he ran across Berns. They were bachelors on the town together, going to clubs, bars, and parties, picking up women. One time, after a night of tomcatting, Berns and Colby returned to their respective apartments, having each taken prisoners. In the morning, Berns invited Colby over for breakfast, who arrived to find Berns and last night’s date nonchalantly sitting around in the nude, acting like they were at a tea party. Colby went along with the gag. These guys were a panic.
Sometimes they brought along Jerry Ragovoy, who had moved from Philadelphia and landed a job as a song plugger for Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye. Berns would no longer take women out on the dance floor, wary of his heart condition, but he would drink, smoke endless Pall Malls, and stay up all hours.
Berns was making the kind of records that would bring him to the attention of Leiber and Stoller. He was Wexler’s new bright-eyed boy and nobody who knew any better could mistake the vibrancy of the Solomon Burke records for Wexler’s usual studio fare. They liked Berns, but Stoller had to smile, standing behind Berns, while he sat at the upright in Leiber and Stoller’s office and demonstrated some songs. The back flap of his toupee had peeled away from its adhesive and Stoller could see that Berns used gum to hold his rug down. But they dug his Cubano thing.
Leiber, in particular, was fascinated with the Gil Hamilton record Berns produced on Capitol, “Tell Her.” He thought it was a hit song. He handed a copy of the single to the four young ladies, high school seniors from Queens, who called themselves the Masterettes, when they came to audition for him and Stoller at their Brill Building office. They came recommended by saxophonist “Big” Al Sears, who had a piece of the girls’ management, and had been accompanied by his partner, Rene Roker, brother of Scepter promotion man Wally Roker, as well as a young man who played piano with them. Leiber thought the girls had something, but wasn’t sure. He switched their lead vocalists and tried the youngest, sixteen-year-old Brenda Reid, who had never been to Manhattan before. He liked what he heard and told them to learn the song and come back.
