Here Comes the Night (30 page)

Rock and roll arrived in Britain sounding like America. “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Bill Haley and His Comets slipped quietly into the British charts in December 1954, a fresh, raucous sound from over the sea with an impudent name, both vulgar and charming in a uniquely American way. Rock and roll in England, at first, was widely viewed as a harmless aberration, a transitory entertainment, certainly nothing to threaten the status quo or scare the horses in the street. But many young Brits immediately cracked the code and understood rock and roll was here to save them from a life of war widows, bus queues, ghastly English cigarettes, and fish and chips wrapped in newspaper.

Unlike in America, rock and roll in Great Britain was hard to find. The American records were only occasionally released by British labels, and the American 45s were highly prized treasures from another world, smuggled into the country by sailors and other world travelers. The English rock and roll hardly matched the American originals. The government controlled the airwaves and the BBC followed strict regulations about what kind of records they would play, concentrating on the
most sanitized, safe programming. The BBC knew what was good for Britain and that generally excluded rock and roll. The one alternative was Radio Luxembourg, a commercial station from the Grand Duchy on the continent whose sputtering signal barely reached the UK. But, as it flickered on and off, static interrupting the broadcast, hypnotized listeners could glimpse a world beyond the Light Programme.

EMI and Decca dominated the British record business. The two giants both manufactured not only phonograph records, but also radios, record players, even needles. Decca was founded in 1929 by stockbroker Edward Lewis, later knighted for his company’s work during the war developing radar. When Sir Joseph Lockwood, a successful flour miller, took over the chairmanship of EMI in 1954 and turned the company’s ailing fortunes around, Lewis took the competition personally. He found some small comfort in the fact that, unlike himself, Lockwood owned no significant amount of EMI stock, so he was “just an employee.”

Lewis brought onboard Dick Rowe, a third-generation stockbroker, to the Decca artists and repertoire department, at least partly because Rowe owned an impressive record collection. Rowe would have a long run on the British charts starting in the early fifties with such British pop stars as Dickie Valentine, Winifred Atwell, David Whitfield, Jimmy Young, the Beverley Sisters. He didn’t know music, but he knew what he wanted on a record and he knew what was commercial. With Norrie Paramor at EMI’s Columbia Records label doing fine with Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Rowe held his own at Decca with conservative, colorless records by clients of manager Larry Parnes: Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury.

Rowe liked Americans, and when Shel Talmy showed up with a stack of acetates he claimed were demos he produced when he worked for Capitol Records in Hollywood that included recordings by Lou Rawls and the Beach Boys, Rowe hired him as a staff producer. Talmy turned out a smooth pop chart entry for Rowe’s latest signing, the
Bachelors, two brothers and a pal from Dublin who all played harmonica and wore matching suits and bow ties. They were discovered in Scotland by their manager Phil Solomon and his booking agent wife, Dorothy. Talmy found the English music scene incredibly backward and was thinking about trying to establish himself as a kind of independent producer along the lines of Leiber and Stoller back home, but there was little precedent for that in Great Britain.

The only independent producer operating in London was eccentric Joe Meek, who used to conduct séances to try to contact the ghost of Buddy Holly for help on sessions at his recording studio. Meek was a RAF electrical engineer who built the EMI Lansdowne Studios, before starting his own small operation above a Holloway Road shop in Islington. Meek, who was obsessed with the occult, outer space, and strange noises, presided over the transcendent “Telstar” by the Tornados, a 1962 instrumental hit with a space-age sound that went into orbit on even the American charts. Rowe leased the odd master or two from Meek.

In the wake of the number one U.K. success of “Please Please Me” by the Beatles in February 1963, after it became evident that the group could well be the biggest thing in the British music business since Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Rowe became unfortunately known as the man who turned down the Beatles. He did give the group thorough scrutiny. Mindful that the group’s manager, Brian Epstein, also ran his family’s NEMS, Liverpool’s leading retail phonograph record shop, Rowe authorized an audition at the Decca studios. The group cut fifteen songs New Year’s Day 1962 under the supervision of Rowe’s assistant, Mike Smith, but the results were hardly promising, mostly tame covers of American rock and roll hits from the band’s stage show. Rowe even traveled to Liverpool to catch the band’s show at the Cavern but turned back after encountering a mob in the pouring rain outside the club blocking his entrance. It didn’t occur to him until months later that the crowd was waiting to see the Beatles.

Rowe mistook the Beatles for the Shadows (“Groups with guitars are on their way out,” he famously told Epstein—seldom in history have men been more wrong) and signed, instead of the Beatles, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, another nascent rock combo that auditioned the same day as the Beatles and had the distinct advantage of living in London. The British music business was always centered in London; Liverpool might as well have been on the other side of the world.

After Epstein and George Martin at EMI subsidiary Parlophone produced in the first few months of the year not only the Beatles but also Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas out of Liverpool, Rowe and the rest of the record industry looked differently at the northern seaport city. Rowe, in fact, ventured back to Liverpool to sit on a panel judging a talent contest and found himself seated next to Beatles guitarist George Harrison, who casually recommended to Rowe an up-and-coming rock group in London called the Rolling Stones. Rowe, more than eager to compensate for losing the most popular new act in years, acceded to demands from the Stones he wouldn’t have considered a few months before. He needed to get with the beat group thing. The first Decca single by the Rolling Stones, a Chuck Berry song, “Come On,” was released in June.

When he saw Parlophone leaving the track lying on the best-selling album without releasing a Beatles single of the song, Rowe had Brian Poole and the Tremeloes cover “Twist and Shout,” a Top Ten hit single for Decca that summer. His Knightsbridge-based publisher, Bobby Mellin, was already working with Rowe and Phil Solomon pulling together material for an American-style folk album with the Bachelors. It was Mellin who suggested bringing over “Twist and Shout” songwriter Bert Berns to produce some sessions for Decca.

Rowe liked to ally himself with professional music business managers long before his string of hits with teen idols who were all handled by British rock and roll impresario Larry Parnes. The British music business did not deal with the amateur musician or songwriter. Philip
Solomon was an established figure in British show business. His father owned the Irish record distributorship Solomon and Peres and was a significant stockholder in Decca Records. His brother Mervyn Solomon, a jazz enthusiast who spent some time working in New York City, was involved in a record label and managed several record shops in Belfast.

Philip Solomon was instrumental in the career of Irish vocalist Ruby Murray, who had six Top Tens in the first half of 1955. He and his glamorous wife Dorothy moved to London in 1958 and opened Dorothy Solomon Artistes Agency. They met Dick Rowe through Solomon’s family connections with Decca and found him the Harmonichords, whom Rowe renamed the Bachelors.

They hatched a plan to pull together a number of beat groups to audition for Berns. They went to Birmingham, the burly Midlands industrial center where Solomon had lined up a couple of groups, Gerry Levene and the Avengers and the Redcaps, and a female vocalist named Brenda Boswell. Solomon also had Miar Davies, a fifteen-year-old singing phenomenon off the TV show from the Midlands Programme,
For Teenagers Only
.

Rowe contacted Larry Page, a onetime teen idol candidate and recording artist known as “Larry Page—The Teenage Rage.” Page, who once dyed his hair blue in a hapless bid for attention, had retired from show business to run a pub in Wales but was lured back. He was managing the Orchid Ballroom in Coventry and had developed a small stable of his own among the local punters. Page was bringing a singer who called himself Johnny B. Great, teenager Shel Naylor, a beat group called the Plazaents, and a trio of pubescent girls he dubbed the Orchids after his ballroom, whom he dressed in schoolgirl uniforms and photographed eating ice lollies.

The British music business was looking eagerly beyond London for the next Liverpool. When West Midlands groups the Redcaps and the Bruisers started making the tiniest noise, no less a figure than Norrie Paramor of EMI jumped on the scene, named it Brum Beat—pundits
in the British press had already tabbed the new rock and roll sound from the north “Mersey Beat”—and he signed five acts from around the Birmingham area in the hope that Brum Beat was going to be the next Mersey Beat. Not to be outdone by EMI, Rowe signed all the acts Solomon and Page presented to Decca. He was also bringing in an American gunfighter.

No American record producer had ever worked in British studios before. When Berns arrived in London that October, the music newspapers took note. “US A&R MAN ON DECCA TALENT SEARCH,” said
Melody Maker
. “American record manager, Bert Berns, who wrote ‘Twist and Shout’ and has had more than 100 songs in the U.S. hit parade [sic], will travel to Birmingham this week with Decca’s Dick Rowe in search of new talent.”

They’d never seen anything like Bert Berns in London before. He was an authentic character, a bit of
Guys and Dolls
in the flesh. He dressed like a racetrack tout, smoked like a chimney, and talked a mile a minute in the hip argot of the Broadway underworld. “Twist and Shout” was the new English national anthem. Even the Isleys version had made a brief appearance on the UK charts that summer. After checking in to the elegant Savoy Hotel and attending meetings at the nearby Decca headquarters on the Embankment, Berns went with Rowe and Solomon to Euston Station to board British Railways for Birmingham.

These new British beat groups had not yet proved successful at all across the Atlantic. New York attorney Paul Marshall, who had not only served since 1958 as chief counsel for Atlantic Records, but also started his entertainment law practice working for Sir Edward Lewis at Decca in London, also represented Brian Epstein and couldn’t find a single American record label with the slightest interest in putting out the Beatles in the States. The first place he took the Beatles records was to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, who dismissed the British group as “derivative” and wanted nothing to do with it. EMI’s American wing, Capitol
Records, already turned the band down. Marshall licensed one record, “She Loves You,” to a small Philadelphia label, Swan Records, who pipelined the side to
American Bandstand’s
Dick Clark, who didn’t hear it either. Marshall made a nothing deal with Chicago r&b indie, Vee-Jay, just to get the records out in this country.

Nobody had any reason to believe these groups were anything more than a peculiar English aberration, unlikely to penetrate the vast American market in any meaningful way. But something was definitely going on in England. Berns had seen the royalty checks. He was a believer. So was Berns’s music publisher, Bobby Mellin, running his publishing firm out of the London office, watching the British music scene practically explode under his feet all year.

“Twist and Shout” started paying like a jackpot, as the Beatles’ success spread rapidly through Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the rest of the British Commonwealth. He saw opportunities for his company’s star writer. This scouting trip would give Berns a chance to see the British music business up close, where he and Mellin were already making plenty of money, even without the States.

Decca Records maintained three studios at their Broadhurst Gardens complex in West Hampstead, the smallest of which, Number Two, was reserved for pop sessions. The control room and the studio had relatively low ceilings around sixteen feet and the main room was about twenty-two feet across and forty-five feet long, large enough for a rhythm section and horns. The control room overlooked the studio from an oblong window and was reached from a flight of stairs at the end of the room. The studio staff wore white lab coats.

Dick Rowe introduced Berns to arranger Mike Leander, a twenty-two-year-old with untamed, woolly hair who had been working at Decca for two years. He landed the job by bluffing his way into the position with an independent production he had done. Born in East London, he went to boarding school on a scholarship, where he studied classical music and played in a skiffle band. He studied law briefly
after school but was working in a music publishing office when he leased his master to Decca. The record flopped, but Rowe offered Leander a staff position and he made records with Billy Fury and other Decca acts, at the same time as he was learning orchestration at Trinity College of Music in Greenwich.

Berns rattled off five tracks with five different acts. Leander brought in a set of session musicians. Berns gave “It’s Driving Me Wild,” the song he wrote with Ray Passman that Conway Twitty recorded two years earlier, to Gerry Levene and the Avengers. He had Johnny B. Great do “You’ll Never Leave Him,” the Berns-Stoller number he had done earlier in the year with the Isleys. He cut Larry Page’s homely Lolitas, the girl group called the Orchids, singing “Everybody’s Love,” the rewrite of “Just like Mine” he would also make with Betty Harris the next month when he returned to New York.

He handed the Redcaps “Come On Girl,” a song he wrote with Stanley Kahan and had already tried a few times, including a version by the Jarmels, following up, without luck, “A Little Bit of Soap.” He put Brenda Boswell together with Johnny B. Great as Brenda & Johnny and gave them a wacky doo-wop version of the Rodgers and Hart chestnut, “It Must Be Love.” Leander caught the Mersey Beat sound on the tracks and Berns gave the records force and focus entirely absent from other British rock productions of the day.