Here Comes the Night (28 page)

After weeks of rehearsing Mimms in Philadelphia, Ragovoy brought him up for the session. Mimms arrived at Rags’s apartment the day before to find Berns and Ragovoy still buffing the song, before running him through one last rehearsal. It was the first time he met Berns, who laid out and let Rags run the show. At the session, his sole direction to Ragavoy was to put Mimms’s voice in “a flood of echo.” There were no Enchanters on the session; Cissy Houston and her two nieces, Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick handled the heavenly harmonies. Paul Griffin’s stately piano opens the track under a gleaming electric guitar introduction. Gary Chester’s drums tumble into the gospel choir’s wail
Cry, cry, bay-ay-by
, Mimms’s arching tenor piercing the blend. It is Ragovoy’s record, but it is Bernsian to the core. Berns took the master to Talmadge at UA and this time the label read A Bert Berns Production—Directed by Jerry Ragavoy. He was moving up.

A couple of weeks later, Berns was back in the studio for United Artists, taking over from Leiber and Stoller at propping up a quickly fading former stalwart of the label. Marv Johnson came to UA in 1959 and managed nine chart records for the label over that time, including two Top Ten hits, “You Got What It Takes” and “I Love the Way You Love,” in 1960.

He was signed to a Detroit-based songwriter who had some success with Jackie Wilson named Berry Gordy Jr., who wrote and recorded Johnson’s first record as the initial release on his own Tamla label, before selling the master and signing Johnson to UA. Gordy closely
supervised Johnson’s recordings, at the same time beginning to build a stable of writers and performers in Detroit that would form the nucleus of Gordy’s Motown Records empire. Gordy understood Johnson’s low-key appeal. Without the flamboyance of a singer like Jackie Wilson, Johnson was cast by Gordy as a kind of genial everyman. He gave him midtempo songs that didn’t test his limited range and a conservative, almost white-sounding production that had been responsible for his surprising durability. Johnson moved to New York and started taking his star status seriously.

By the time Gordy was too busy with his rapidly blossoming enterprise in Detroit, he was pissed off at Johnson and glad to be rid of him. Leiber and Stoller had outfitted Johnson with dramatic material more suited to Chuck Jackson. They had tried him with Bacharach and David. His last three releases had failed to make the charts when Berns took him in the studio.

“Come On and Stop” was one of Berns’s most exciting productions yet, but he buried Johnson in the arrangement. He has Cissy Houston and her girls blasting the chorus of the Bert Russell song in counterpoint until Garnet Mimms leaps out of the fray and sails away with the song. By the time the song gets back to Johnson’s solo vocal, he is an anticlimactic bump in the road on the way to the next explosive chorus by his background singers. The record never amounted to anything when it was released, but Berns noted the electric guitar lick he used to anchor the verse. It would turn up again.

Berns also handled for UA a session with another group on the label that turned out to be the last record in the surprisingly long-lasting career of the Wanderers, an old-fashioned vocal quintet modeled on the Mills Brothers that had been recording since 1953 without ever having a hit record. It probably didn’t hurt the group’s longevity that the Wanderers were managed by Roy Rifkind, brother of Julie Rifkind, Berns’s pal at MGM Records. Roy was widely thought to be connected, and whether he was or not, he knew those guys. Berns gave Wanderers
vocalist Ray Pollard something to dig into on “You Can’t Run Away from Me,” a tuneful Bert Russell song tied to an acoustic guitar figure and seductive Latin drive.

Don Drowty came east to do Dante solo sessions with Berns for UA. Dante and the Evergreens had broken up after the fellows all ate something and got ill, one of them so severely the other guys had to leave him in the hospital in New York and returned to Los Angeles without him. Drowty went back to college. Every so often, he would find a $100 bill in the mail from Berns “for books.” Berns talked Bobby Mellin into hiring Drowty to run a Los Angeles office and Drowty rented a small space on Sunset Boulevard, although he continued to go to school and showed up to open the office only around noon. Mellin got angry and closed the office when he found out Drowty had been letting musician friends sleep on the office sofa. Drowty never did the firm much good in Hollywood anyhow. Berns, ever the loyal friend, cut a set of demos with Drowty in New York, but nothing ever came of that.

Berns was the unquestioned big dog songwriter at Mellin publishing. He had at least one record on the
Billboard Hot 100
every week since “Tell Him” entered the charts in December 1962, sometimes more than one. He was working with all the tops in the field. He was making money for everybody. Over at Atlantic, Wexler had taken a special interest in Berns. The new junior songwriter Mellin hired, twenty-three-year-old Doug Morris, former boy singer, fresh out of the Army, used to take Berns’s checks over to him at Atlantic Studios on Sixtieth Street, where he was spending more time than at the Mellin offices (in 1980, Doug Morris would be named president of Atlantic Records; he produced the 2002 collection
The Heart and Soul of Bert Berns
for Universal Records).

Berns and Wexler were becoming the best of friends. They even went into the studio and cut another Russell Byrd record, Berns singing a song he wrote with Wexler, “That’s When I Hurt,” and a bit of dialect comedy, “Chico and Maria,” that went unreleased by Atlantic.
Berns would spend weekends out at Wex’s Long Island place, tooling around the sound with him on Wexler’s boat in his little yachting cap, listening to his endless line of patter.

Berns liked voices. His records were all carefully constructed to support and enhance the lead vocal performance. He wanted to push singers to the brink of hysteria. He needed to feel the urgency, the power, the passion in the singing. One of his signature stunts was to have the vocalist saunter through the opening line, almost casually, and then step on the gas with the second line, a sudden turn into despair that deepens the plot in the opening scene. He liked the sound of women in distress—from Baby Jane and the Rockabyes’ Madelyn Moore to powerful, gospel-drenched singers like Sylvia Hill or Ruth McFadden whom he recorded the previous year for Capitol. Betty Harris was the same model, exactly Berns’s type.

She didn’t know Berns wrote “Cry to Me” when she auditioned for him by singing the song. She didn’t know that he originally envisioned the song the way she sang it, slowed down to a crawl. She knew the Solomon Burke record and she liked to sing the song slowly, as she did in her a cappella audition in Berns’s 1650 Broadway office.

Harris was a nineteen-year-old soul ingénue, reasonably fresh out of Florida (by way of Philadelphia), brought to Berns by Babe Chivian, a Philadelphia insurance salesman who doubled as Solomon Burke’s manager. She was a stagestruck cutie with a big gospel voice who spent a month or so under the tutelage of blues singer Big Maybelle, whom she sought out backstage at the Apollo after watching her perform several times in one day. Berns signed Harris to Jubilee Records through Leiber and Stoller, who cut the deal with Jerry Blaine, took a taste for themselves, and left the work entirely in Berns’s hands. It was the young girl’s first time in a big-city recording studio.

From the first sob that bursts almost involuntarily from her throat, Betty Harris slowly, deliberately, picks her way through the pathos of Berns’s breakthrough composition. She sings the song with a bitter
authority that draws a lot of its strength from the funereal cadence at which the song in her retelling creeps. Garry Sherman eases in voices and strings, but Harris dangles in front of everything, alone in her pain, writhing in agony. The record did much better even than Burke’s original hit on the Pop charts (number twenty-two) and made Top Ten R&B when it was released in September.

The song on the other side of the record is the remarkable “I’ll Be a Liar.” Songwriter Berns is dealing with compulsive behavior. The song’s protagonist is under the spell of her lover so much that she will tell lies for him—
for the rest of my days
—although there is no specific lie mentioned, or any exact deed to be refuted. He drives the vocalist to almost disturbingly abstract extremes. Much of the song’s emotional furor is rooted in an invisible subtext. Harris didn’t understand the song and didn’t like it, but she sang this odd piece of psycho-soul with a terrifying ferocity.

Nothing was more remote from Times Square than Southern California beaches, which was one reason the surf music boomlet was slow to register with the Brill Building crowd. The only major label located in the provincial outpost of Hollywood, Capitol Records, jumped in the water. Their group, the Beach Boys, struck the Top Ten that spring 1963 with “Surfin’ USA,” nothing more than watered-down Chuck Berry. Capitol also won the fevered bidding to sign surf guitarist Dick Dale, who had been presiding over capacity crowds of barefoot dancers across the street from the beach at the old big band haunt, the Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach, outside L.A. His album
Surfers’ Choice
had been the best-selling LP the past year and a half at Wallichs Music City, Hollywood’s big retail record store at Sunset and Vine, down the street from the Capitol tower. He was a phenomenon, although he was entirely unknown outside the five Southern California counties. The question was, would surf music’s California appeal work with East Coast youth? Capitol was betting it would. The label gave Dick Dale an unprecedented $50,000 advance, more than RCA Victor
paid Elvis. The twist. Bossa nova. Surf music. All in the space of a year. Who knew anything?

Berns did know that he had floated a routine King Curtis instrumental the entire previous summer simply by calling it “Beach Party.” Even so, there was no excuse for “Surf and Shout” by the Isley Brothers, a combination of “Twist and Shout” and Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” that should have never been allowed to happen. Some surf record. But the flip side, recorded at the same session, was exquisite, prime Berns heartbreak, “You’ll Never Leave Him,” one of the two songs he wrote with Mike Stoller at his penthouse. Berns himself plays the acoustic guitar figure on the record that pulls the entire arrangement together.

Carl Spencer introduced Berns to Jimmy Radcliffe, who worked for Aaron Schroeder as a songwriter and Gene Pitney’s recording manager. He also sang a lot of demo recordings, especially for Bacharach. A large teddy bear of a fellow, Radcliffe wrote a couple of songs with Berns, and Berns cut a couple of songs Radcliffe and Carl Spencer wrote. He sang background vocals on Berns sessions, his deep, rich voice often rounding out the bottom end of the vocal mix with the Cissy Houston singers.

Radcliffe, who also played guitar, was one of those all-around talents that always seemed to be on the sidelines of the scene. He cut Bacharach and David’s “(There Goes) The Forgotten Man” for Schroeder’s Musicor label, released about the same time Berns took him in the studio and did the elegiac “Through a Long and Sleepless Night,” an old song out of a late forties Hollywood movie from Hal David’s older brother, Mack David. Radcliffe gives the sonorous ballad a powerful performance, his vibrato carefully rimming every line, Berns keeping his vocal poised on a rising bed of strings in his commanding, panoramic production—another brilliant record nobody heard.

Another Berns-Radcliffe-Spencer song, “My Block,” was recorded by the Chiffons under the name the Four Pennies and released in June 1963, although the pseudonymous record hardly fared as well as the
Goffin-King song “One Fine Day” by the Chiffons, a Top Five hit under the group’s real name that came out only three weeks earlier.

Berns took one of Carl Spencer and Jimmy Radcliffe’s songs when he went into the studio next with Tammy Montgomery, who was, along with Solomon Burke and Betty Harris, also handled by Babe Chivian. She was signed to the Chicago-based r&b label Chess Records out of the company’s New York office.

She grew up in Philadelphia and won a talent contest on the Jersey shore when she was eleven years old. By the time she was fourteen, she was recording for Luther Dixon at Wand. She toured with James Brown and he produced a single with her on his Try Me label. The two fell in love, although theirs was a tumultuous affair. Chivian took Betty Harris to visit her in the hospital, where Brown had left the tiny teenager after one of their fights.
*

The focus of the session was Berns’s song, “If I Would Marry You,” which Berns knocked into shape for the teenage soul singer. Berns anchored the record to a reverb-drenched electric guitar part that sounded as funky as something out of the Chess studios in Chicago, where they used a thirteen-foot piece of sewer pipe for an echo chamber.

Berns came back a changed man from his October trip to England, where a rock and roll group called the Beatles had made a huge hit out of his “Twist and Shout.” Berns saw how backward the British record business was and he glimpsed the enormous talent pool in his quick introduction to the blooming English music scene. He had been greeted like a conquering hero and he began to see the vast reach of his music. Something was in the air. Berns felt the world turning. A new seriousness of purpose attended his work.

Outside the studio, Berns and Wexler were cooking up plans. Other than Berns, at this point, Atlantic Records had nobody making
hit records for the label. Leiber and Stoller still produced the Drifters and Ben E. King, but that relationship was growing even more strained. Wexler behind their backs referred to Leiber and Stoller as “Mr. Lust and Mr. Greed.” The Stax/Volt deal with the small Memphis label looked good; their latest project was a promising young singer named Otis Redding, who was beginning to sell a few records.

Other than that, Atlantic had been dry as dirt when they picked up a master from a local producer in Detroit that went into the Top Five that summer of 1963, “Hello Stranger” by Barbara Lewis, a welcome drink of water in a parched landscape for Atlantic. “Just One Look” by Doris Troy, another happy gift, came in over the transom. The label couldn’t stay in business counting on those.