Here Comes the Night (36 page)
Bert Berns, The McCoys (front), Jerry Goldstein (left), Bob Feldman (right)
I
N MARCH 1965,
his contract with Mellin expired and Berns formed a publishing company with the Atlantic partners called Web IV, owned 50 percent by Berns and 50 percent by Wexler and the Ertegun brothers. The company’s name stood for the four partners’ names—Wexler, Ertegun, and Berns—with the Roman numeral for all four. Although the music publishing firm was announced first, it was always the plan to also start a record company. They wanted his publishing and Berns wanted them to bankroll him in a label. Wexler resisted, but Berns saw how Leiber and Stoller were doing at Red Bird. Ilene Berns was the one who suggested they scramble all their names together and they came up with Bang Records for Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and Gerald (only his mother ever called Wexler “Gerald”). His partners put up $17,500. Berns took an office in 1650 Broadway and placed a help wanted ad for a secretary in
The New York Times
.
Berns wasn’t exactly leaving Atlantic in a lurch, but Wexler and the Erteguns were not only helping Berns start his record label, but also helping themselves to his publishing. They couldn’t lose, and they could win on both bets. Ertegun’s father would have been proud of such Turkish diplomacy. “Exactly,” his son Ahmet Ertegun would say to anyone. About anything. It was one of his favorite expressions. It almost sounded as if he agreed with you.
At the same time, in one of the record business’s worst-kept secrets, Atlantic was deep in negotiation to sell the company to ABC-Paramount, the loathsome square record company that had wrested Ray Charles from their bosom five years before. The label may not have been hip, but with parent company ABC Television hovering in the background, the label did have money. Still, Wexler complained that when ABC-Paramount chiefs Sam Clark and Larry Newton came over to his Great Neck place to talk about the deal, it took a week to get the grease stains out of the sofa where they sat.
Atlantic had entered into serious discussions with ABC-Paramount about selling the company. Atlantic chief counsel Paul Marshall spent long hours over the coming months negotiating the terms. Although Wexler and the Erteguns expected to be contractually tied to Atlantic for a number of years after the sale, they set up Berns in a separate partnership, outside the boundaries of the sale (although they did give Berns a small piece of their music publishing firm, Cotillion Music, when they cut the Web IV deal, something they would come to regret).
Wexler watched over every detail of Bang Records. When Berns hired his secretary, an eighteen-year-old Queens College freshman still living at home with her parents in Forest Hills named Sheila Silverstein, Wexler sent her directly to Ahmet’s steely assistant, Noreen Woods at Atlantic, for training. When she returned to work at the Bang Records office in 1650, it was only she and Berns in one small room.
Berns finally got his first number one through a screwy chain of events nobody could have seen coming. When he did, it came first class, hand delivered to him on his vacation. Berns hit the trifecta—he owned the song, the group, and this time, the record label. It was the kind of play only the big boys made.
Bob Feldman, Richard Gottehrer, and Jerry Goldstein didn’t know Berns, even though they’d been around 1650 a few years, and were fairly well known themselves as the Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein who wrote the 1962 number one hit “My Boyfriend’s Back” by the
Angels. They knew who he was, of course. They showed him some songs once. They remembered Phil Spector wanting to catch a train in Philadelphia to make a party at Berns’s place.
Bobby Feldman was a kid from Brooklyn who danced on the Alan Freed TV show
The Big Beat
, a local New York City afternoon dance program that Freed ran from 1958 until he was fired during the payola scandal. Feldman showed Freed’s manager Jack Hooke a poem he had written called “The Big Beat.” When Hooke told him that if the poem had music behind it, it could be the show’s theme song, Feldman went around the corner to see his stickball buddy, Jerry Goldstein, whose parents had providentially recently bought a new piano and who knew three chords. The song was recorded and used as the show’s theme song.
The boys had their first published composition and everything was going great until Feldman showed up as always to dance on the TV show to find Hooke outside waiting for him. The mother of the lead singer from the group who sang their song had raised holy hell with her congressman or something after she watched her daughter take the check from the last week’s TV show in front of the union official and then endorse it back to the producers after he left. Feldman’s career with Freed had come to an end.
Feldman and Goldstein knocked around writing songs, recording the results. They were Evie and the Ivies. They cut a Buddy Holly memorial song, “A Letter to Donna,” two days after the plane crash. They were Bob and Jerry who did the answer song “We Put the Bomp.” They found themselves sitting around a Brill Building office for a couple of hours waiting to show some songs to Nat King Cole’s publisher alongside another young songwriter, Richard Gottehrer, a tall, good-looking twenty-one-year-old, exactly their age, who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. They introduced themselves, started talking, and eventually left together to write songs rather than continue to sit around.
In 1962, the three of them sold “I’m Tossin’ and Turnin’ Again” to Beltone Records as a follow-up for Bobby Lewis a full year after his big hit, “Tossin’ and Turnin’,” and they wrote and produced “What Time Is It” by the Jive Five for the same label, although the label owner took the credit. Wes Farrell convinced them to sign with Roosevelt Music when he landed them the next Freddy Cannon single. They wrote the song in the car on the way to Philadelphia the next day to play it for his record label.
They moved from Roosevelt to a new publishing firm, April/Blackwood, and were pulling down $200 a week, serious money, supervising their own demos, hustling their own songs. They took an office next door to April/Blackwood in the 1650 building and started to become more involved in producing.
They were working with a female vocal trio from New Jersey called the Angels, who had a couple of singles a couple of years before. The girls were trying to make ends meet singing background vocals on sessions. It all fell together quickly after Feldman went to have a sentimental egg cream in Brooklyn across the street from his old high school and he heard the young lady in the back room screaming at the some guy in a black leather jacket, “My boyfriend’s back and you’re going to be in trouble.”
Feldman scribbled some notes on a napkin and rushed back to Manhattan. The three songwriters finished the song before going out to a late-night dinner that evening. April/Blackwood wanted the song for the Shirelles, currently the top girl group in the country, but the fellows refused to play it for them. They wanted to produce the song themselves. They were locked out of their office. Their contracts were dropped. They scraped together enough money to produce a split session with the Angels and two other acts and sold all three masters, the first two for $1,500 apiece and “My Boyfriend’s Back” for $10,000. Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein were in business.
They produced more Angels records. They produced records that sounded like the Angels and the Angels stopped working with them. They started their own label, Stork Records (“delivering the hits”),
with pink labels for girl artists and blue labels for boys. Morris Levy offered them $10,000 for “Lookin’ for Boys” by the Pin-Ups—threw the cash on the desk—but they were so sure they had a hit, they held out.
Within weeks, they were sorting through old Angels tapes to see if they had anything that could make them a little money. By this time, of course, British bands had wiped girl groups off the charts when Feldman ran across the tape they made for the Angels of the old Jo Stafford song, “That’s All I Want from You.” He wrote some new lyrics and the three of them laid down vocals, but when Feldman got to the middle eight, he improvised some crazy stuff in this bad English accent. Can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Marty Kupersmith, one of Jay’s original Americans, was visiting their office, wearing those silly glasses and giving the arm salutes from the Peter Sellers character in the movie
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
. Feldman snatched the glasses and started talking in his fake British accent, and the Strangeloves were born.
They sold the Strangeloves single, “Love, Love,” to Swan Records in Philadelphia for $1,500 and it picked up a little airplay.
*
They started getting calls from WGH in Virginia Beach, where the record was doing particularly well, asking the Strangeloves to appear on the station’s Halloween concert with Chuck Berry, the Shangri-Las, Gene Pitney, and Bobby “Boris” Pickett.
“We’re not British, we’re Yiddish,” they told the deejay, who told them never mind—play his concert and he would make their record number one. They had never performed in public before, but they were not in a position to turn down work. Feldman didn’t feel that confident of his British accent, so they decided to be Australians.
They took two cars and were arrested en route for speeding. The radio station had to bail them out, but they finally arrived at the Newport News airport. They boarded a private plane that taxied—never left the
ground—down the runway to the Virginia Beach airport. Police lines were holding back thousands of teens. They held up signs and banners reading
WELCOME TO AMERICA, WE LOVE YOU
. They threw jellybeans, teddy bears, even stuffed kangaroos. The mayor gave them the key to the city.
The three counterfeit Australians in cashmere sweaters and jeans played their American debut—a forty-minute show, of which an elongated version of “Shout” accounted for almost half. The group also played a thunderous version of “Bo Diddley.” Swan Records did not want another Strangeloves record, but a New York studio operator fronted them some time and they cut a monster version of “Bo Diddley.”
Ahmet Ertegun met one of the songwriters at a party and took an interest in their work. They brought him the “Bo Diddley” demo. Ertegun liked it, but when they played it for Wexler, he hit the ceiling. He didn’t want to hear white guys sing “Bo Diddley” and he said so in no uncertain terms, at the top of his voice, and threw them out of his office. Ertegun followed them down the hall. Atlantic had a new partnership starting out with Bert Berns, he told the Strangeloves. Take it over to him and see what he thinks.
They checked out Berns with a few people. Stanley Kahan, who wrote “Killer Joe” and other songs with Berns and worked with the Strangeloves when they were staff writers at Roosevelt Music, thought it was a great idea. “Bert Berns is the luckiest guy in the world,” he told them.
The three songwriters began to develop an intricate cover story. The Strangeloves were three brothers—Niles, Miles, and Giles Strange—from Armstrong, Australia, on the edge of the outback. They were born to one mother, but have three different fathers, which accounts for the almost total lack of family resemblance. They were wealthy sheep farmers who made a fortune on a crossbreed called the Gottehrer sheep, registered with the Feldman-Goldstein Company. The band members adopted a severely exotic look with zebra-skin vests and
matching African hair drums—not very Australian—carrying spears and brandishing boomerangs.
They met with Berns. He loved the track, but agreed with Wexler. He suggested writing a new set of lyrics—the sad truth of Bo Diddley’s life was that a beat cannot be copyrighted—and he thought they should stick with the outrageous. Inspired by the X-rated novel and literary
scandal du jour, Candy
by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, that Berns had been reading, the four of them cooked up “I Want Candy.” Berns also brought veteran session guitarist Everett Barksdale to drop some licks on the explosive existing track. Barksdale, who played for years in the Art Tatum Trio, used a jazzy arch-top electric and his playing has a crumbling, fleeting feel that skitters superbly across the bold, bashing beat of the drum-heavy track.
By the time the record came out in May 1965, Berns had brought Julie Rifkind to work at Bang. Rifkind, former promotion man at MGM Records and old-time record business guy, was well known enough in the industry to have his name featured alongside Berns in the trade advertisements announcing the label’s first two releases—“I Want Candy” by the Strangeloves and “Shake and Jerk” by Billy Lamont, a fairly ordinary dance record Wexler picked up. The yellow label on the record showed a smoking gun.
“I Want Candy” took off, bumping the bottom of the Top Ten at number eleven on the pop charts (eclipsing the two other singles Berns had on the
Hot 100
at the time, “Here Comes the Night” by Them and “Baby I’m Yours” by Barbara Lewis on Atlantic). The Strangeloves hit the road on package tours with other top stars of the British Invasion—the Searchers, the Seekers, the Zombies, Freddie and the Dreamers, and the Dave Clark Five.
Berns sent them into Bell Sound for a week in July to cut an album. The three songwriters had recently caught the nightclub act of the Vibrations at an Upper East Side hot spot called Ondine’s. Freshly reminded of the group’s “My Girl Sloopy,” written, as it was, by two
key figures in their own career, the Strangeloves cut a version of their own that they called “Hang On Sloopy” for the album. When they went back out on the road, they included the song in their set.
At the end of a series of dates with the Dave Clark Five, the English rock group taped the Strangeloves playing the song and told the group they were going back to England to record the song as their next single. This was, like, the second biggest English rock group below the Beatles, thinking the Strangeloves’ song was good enough to copy. The Strangeloves had been getting good response with it onstage. They decided they would release the song on a single as soon as they returned to New York, after one last show the next night in Dayton, Ohio.
