Here Comes the Night (32 page)

The first release was “Jose He Say” by Linda Laurie, the nutty kid whose off-the-top ad-libbing Phil Ramone turned into the hit record “Ambrose (Part Five)” in 1959. Part wacky beatnik, part naïve waif, she used her Brooklyn little girl voice talking to her boyfriend (
Ambrose, why are we walking through the subway tunnel?
) and dropped into a deep, trick voice to reply (
Just keep walking
). With the record set in a subway tunnel, “Ambrose” may have been a midchart record everywhere else, but in New York City it struck home. The modest hit
spawned a series of “Ambrose” records that had played out its string when Berns found her. They collaborated on a couple of pieces of dialect humor, “Jose He Say,” a Bert Russell number where Laurie got to again use her trick voice, and “Chico,” which Berns and Laurie adapted from the other side of his unreleased Russell Byrd record, “Chico and Maria.”

The record picked up some play here and there, but his own label wasn’t Berns’s top priority. As great as it was to have his own imprint, none of this mattered as much as the work at hand at Atlantic.

Only Solomon Burke was selling any records and Atlantic had gone ice cold after the previous summer. The company released around fifteen singles every month. Singles amounted to half the company’s revenue, pushing $7 million annual sales, according to
Billboard
. Live by the hit single. Die by the hit single.

Wexler had been grooming Berns for this step, literally since he took him into the studio two years before to record “Cry to Me.” Wexler was Berns’s biggest booster, best friend, closest musical confidant. He was a hip father figure. To Berns, he offered the encouragement, the acknowledgement Berns always sought and never got from his own father. He had taken over at the label where Leiber and Stoller left off. At Atlantic, Wexler gave Berns the keys to the kingdom and told him to let them sing his songs and play his music. He was home.

On the
Billboard Hot 100
on May 9, 1964, the first week since February that the Beatles didn’t have the number one (Louis Armstrong did with “Hello Dolly”), Berns had four records he wrote and produced for Atlantic on the pop charts. “My Girl Sloopy” reached the height of its chart life at number twenty-seven. “Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye)” by Solomon Burke was halfway up the charts after a month. “That’s When It Hurts” by Ben E. King and “One Way Love” by the Drifters were just starting up. But that was only Atlantic. Way up above all these r&b records, scraping the bottom of the Top Ten at number eleven was “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles. Good week.

Berns continued to do a few independent productions with other labels. He and Paul Colby hung out all hours of the night before Berns had a session scheduled with Lou Christie (“Two Faces Have I”) for Roulette. Colby wound up with half the songwriting credit on “You May Be Holding My Baby” largely by staying up with Berns while he pounded out the thing for the next day’s session. Berns finished up at United Artists, where Art Talmadge was having problems hanging on to his job, with a one-off by a singer named Larry Hale (“In Front of Her House”) and a marathon Isley Brothers session to finish an album that included Isley originals “Who’s That Lady” and “Love Is a Wonderful Thing” (Ragovoy continued to produce Garnet Mimms at UA).

Berns cut more demos with Dante (Don Drowty), including a collaboration of theirs called “Jo-Jo” that baldly appropriated the melody from the current hit instrumental “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” Berns reunited with Gil Hamilton, who sang the original version of “Tell Him” two years before. Under the name Johnny Thunder, Hamilton had a Top Five smash in early 1963 with “Loop De Loop,” a dim-witted dance song, and Berns outfitted Thunder with a couple of up-tempo numbers, “More More More Love Love Love”—a WABC “Pick of the Week” until some British group knocked it off the playlist—and “Send Her to Me,” for Kolsky and Kahl’s Diamond label. He invited Hamilton to join the chorus at the next Drifters session, where Hoagy Lands was also going to put his voice in the blend.

Drifters vocalists Johnny Moore and Rudy Lewis ate dinner together and talked about the session the night before it was scheduled. Later that night, Lewis was found dead in his hotel room from a drug overdose. Charlie Thomas of the Drifters was brought to Lewis’s room the next morning and closed the dead man’s eyes. Then he went to the studio for the session. Belonging to the Drifters was not for sissies.

Wexler blamed the union for not canceling the session, but of course he didn’t want to spend the money. Weeks of preparation had gone into
the planning. Berns had stormed out of Wexler’s office after one meeting. He hated the song that Wexler found, “Under the Boardwalk,” and he wanted baritone vocalist Charlie Thomas to sing lead on one of his songs, “I Don’t Want to Go On without You,” while Wexler was arguing for Johnny Moore. Berns’s gifted British arranger Mike Leander had come over for the sessions and written a magnificent string orchestration for Berns’s song. Leander couldn’t be credited because of immigration and unions, but he was working shoulder to shoulder with Berns on this session. Berns felt so strongly about Thomas singing the song, he spent a number of afternoons rehearsing at his penthouse, just him on guitar and Thomas. Berns sent Thomas to a lady voice teacher on West Fifty-Seventh Street, who had the Drifter walking around singing through a trumpet mouthpiece.

Thomas and the other Drifters assembled, numbed and confused, at Atlantic Studios that morning in May 1964 after Lewis died. They genuinely liked Lewis, and since he had managed to keep his drug habit a secret from the group, his death came as a sudden shock. Berns considered “Under the Boardwalk” a lightweight throwaway by a couple of unknown Brill Building songwriters, Artie Resnick and Kenny Young, still looking for their first big song. He was banking on the dark, brooding dirge he wrote that he rehearsed in such detail with Thomas, “I Don’t Want to Go On without You,” a title that suddenly that morning took on deeper significance.

They ran quickly through “Boardwalk” and cut the session’s second song, the Bert Russell number “He’s Just a Playboy,” in two different keys for vocalist Johnny Moore, not originally scheduled to sing the song’s lead, some quick pencil work by Leander and Teacho Wiltshire, the official arranger of the session, as far as the union was concerned. Berns saved the big number for last. As Leander’s lilting, sonorous chamber orchestra filled the room, Gary Chester tapping out quiet, stately waltz time, Thomas leaned into a carefully measured performance, tinged by a reservoir of incredible sadness.

Here in the gloom of my lonely room

I hold her handkerchief and smell her sweet perfume
.

I can’t stand to live on without you
.

Oh my darling, hear my plea
,

Come on back to me
.

—
I DON’T WANT TO GO ON WITHOUT YOU (BERNS-WEXLER, 1964)

THE DRIFTERS OFFERED
Hoagy Lands the spot in the group. He asked Berns to look into it. They ate breakfast together the next day and Berns laid it out to Lands. Manager George Treadwell maintained his iron hand on the group. The performers did not participate in royalties or performance fees, and in fact, any songwriting compositions by group members were copyrighted by Treadwell. The pay was a flat $250 a week. Berns recommended Lands take it. Married with six children, Lands, who had started writing his own material, balked. Berns told him to ride out the contract and go solo in two years, like Ben E. King, but poor Lands didn’t want to play ball.

As they spoke, Berns was remaking Ben E. King, as with the Drifters, taking over where Leiber and Stoller left off. After “That’s When It Hurts,” Berns had taken King back into the studio and cut four songs that steered the r&b balladeer of Leiber and Stoller’s creation even more firmly into new territory. Berns gave King lower keys to sing and the songs settled into his power alley. He also gave King, last heard singing “I Could Have Danced All Night” from
My Fair Lady
, some gritty emotional depths to bite down on. Berns took him back to church. In May, King recorded the Bert Russell–Mike Leander song “It’s All Over,” and the chilling intensity of the song, the abject, naked heartbreak of the piece, was something entirely new for a Ben E. King record.

Two weeks after Ben E. King, one week after the Drifters session, Berns presided over another major epiphany in the studio at a Solomon Burke session. Berns had Burke cut a couple of clunkers—“You May Be
Holding My Baby,” the song he finished the night before he cut it with Lou Christie only months before, and “Lili Marlene,” the German beer hall song out of Marlene Dietrich’s repertoire. It was Burke who took the session into another dimension.

Over a three-chord vamp drawn straight from his church service’s “money march,” Bishop Burke starts preaching wonderful nonsense about “there’s a song I sing and I believe if everybody was to sing this song, it would save the whole world.” Burke had never been modest in his ambitions, but as Cissy Houston and the girls stop shouting in the background and gather themselves into his gospel choir to kick the song into motion, Burke launches into sermonized soul that would be his grand moment, his greatest truth, nothing less than his magisterial summation of the whole human condition, “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” The spirit pours out of Burke in a torrent. Arranger Phil Medley’s horn punches barely contain him as he barrels his way through the message, the winds of love filling his sails.

If ever a pop song summoned the power of God, it was “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” It is not a song so much as a performance, a blast of Burke’s towering, commanding presence funneled into a three-minute sermon, but it still needed to be copyrighted.

Burke was appalled when Wexler told Burke he was taking half the writer’s share for himself and Berns. Wexler told Burke he didn’t think the song was a hit, so it wouldn’t matter. The tempo was too fast for the teens. He didn’t like Burke preaching—Wexler had told him that before—Atlantic wasn’t a gospel label. The company leveraged Burke’s publishing account against money he borrowed and he owed them. When the copyright went to paper, all three—Burke, Wexler, and Berns—shared the songwriting equally. Although Burke was signed as a writer to Atlantic’s new publishing company, Cotillion Music, the song was published by Berns’s new publishing venture, Keetch, Caesar & Dino.

Burke was furious. He was not just another soul singer who depended on Wexler and Atlantic for everything. He answered a
greater calling. He believed in a higher power and he recognized Wexler’s earthly greed for what it was. He had quit the music business once before over just such mortal matters. He also knew that since he had put his own name on that hundred-year-old folk song, he was not without guilt. He said it himself in the song—
Sometimes you get what you want, but you lose what you had
.

Berns had reached a new level; he was joining the ruling class of the record business. He had become one of the overlords who could take for the taking, who could play the great con game of the music industry for what it was worth, and who could reap all the rewards he could claim as his own. He learned from the masters. Nobody in this greedy, larcenous pit of vipers was more duplicitous, poisonous, and arrogant than Jerry Wexler, and Berns was studying up close. He was also falling in love.

She called herself Ilene Stuart, this gorgeous twenty-two-year-old blonde who danced at the Roundtable, the mobster hangout on East Fiftieth Street co-owned by Morris Levy. She still lived with her parents in Long Island, and her older sister, Marcy, recently divorced, had moved back home with her infant daughter. Since her sister didn’t drive, she talked Ilene into taking her into Manhattan in their mother’s brand-new Lincoln Continental on a Sunday afternoon. Their salesman father never made much money, but he always owned a new luxury auto.

The two sisters went for hamburgers at P.J. Clarke’s on the Upper East Side and were seated at a table when Marcy sidled up at the bar next to Mickey Raygor, Berns’s old friend from the Bronx who went to Cuba with him. He and Berns were having burgers and beer at the bar, but Raygor and Ilene’s older sister struck up a conversation. They fed the little sister some line about a party at the penthouse and repaired to Berns’s place not far away. Before long, the older sister and Raygor were back in Berns’s bedroom and Berns was sitting around the living room with this innocent young thing who didn’t even drink.

Ilene Holub, her real name, grew up in Los Angeles on the cusp of Beverly Hills. Her mother was raised Irish Catholic but converted to Judaism when she married Ilene’s father. Ilene went to school with the sons and daughters of the rich and privileged and was so concerned about her appearance, she worked two jobs after school to save money to have her nose fixed. Her mother always favored her two older sisters and her younger brother, who almost landed a part in
Marjorie Morningstar
, except his blue eyes clashed with the brown eyes of star Natalie Wood. There were compensations. The music was great—Phil Spector’s high school group, the Teddy Bears, played at her junior high—the cars were wonderful, and the beach was always there.

For a golden moment, her life was a teenage paradise in the Southern California wonderland—
American Bandstand
on TV every afternoon, burgers with the Fairfax High gang at Dolores’ on Wilshire—but when her parents moved to Oakland, California, when Ilene was sixteen, she dropped out of the tenth grade rather than go with them. When her sisters both married
schlubs
from Brooklyn and the Bronx around the same time and moved back to New York, her parents took the other children and moved back East with them.

She went from teenage heaven to a roach-infested high-rise in Queens, where she shared the tiny bedroom with her brother, and their parents slept in a pull-out couch in the living room. After Ilene made a lame suicide attempt, her parents moved the family to Long Island, where the beach reminded her of California, and she started modeling. She started dancing. She worked as a Twister at the Roundtable in a cage across the room from an unknown Goldie Hawn. She danced at private clubs. She escorted an elderly Franchot Tone to a film premiere and got her picture in the paper and a limousine ride home. She was no longer a skinny, gawky kid—she looked like a Las Vegas showgirl—although she didn’t know it.