Here Comes the Night (7 page)
Frankie Lymon, George Goldner
T
HE FIVE TEENAGERS
who called themselves the Coupe de Villes were accustomed to moving their impromptu rehearsals. They would sing in the hallways, the same songs over and over, until the neighbors complained. They often retreated to the hallway in bass vocalist Sherman Garnes’s building across the street from Edward W. Stitt Junior High School at the corner of 165th Street and Edgecombe Avenue, the heart of Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood.
One of Sherman’s neighbors, who used to stop and listen to the boys practice, brought them a stack of letters, love poems his girlfriend had written him. He suggested they work up some material of their own. The group roughed out a melody and the harmonies together. Herman Santiago and Jimmy Merchant punched the lyrics in shape, working around a line from one of the girl’s poems: “Why do birds sing so gay.”
Richie Barrett, who lived on 161st Street, was something of a neighborhood hero. He was not only the handsome lead vocalist of the Valentines whose record “Lily Maebelle” lit up New York radio that spring of 1955 (and was paying the bills at Rama Records), but he was also doing some artists and repertoire work downtown for George Goldner, the mambo man who also produced the Valentines’ records and owned the Rama label, his venture into the world of rhythm and
blues. The Coupe de Villes used to stand under Barrett’s balcony and sing “Lily Maebelle.” Barrett couldn’t fail to notice the kids singing his hit with the crazy Puerto Rican lead vocalist, Herman Santiago.
Barrett finally agreed to listen to the group rehearse at the Stitt auditorium and was impressed enough with their new original song to take the group—now calling themselves the Premiers—downtown to meet Goldner. The always-natty Goldner wore an embroidered shirt and a mohair suit. His latest chart success, the Cleftones, a five-man vocal group from Queens, only a couple of years older than the Premiers and who had the hit “You Baby You,” were also visiting the West Forty-First Street offices, discussing plans for another record, and stayed to watch the audition.
Goldner, who expected a Latin band, wondered where all the instruments were. Barrett had them sing anyway. Herman Santiago had a cold and couldn’t sing well and Goldner asked the youngest member of the group, thirteen-year-old Frankie Lymon, to try singing the lead. The kid couldn’t even get the words right, but Goldner loved the song and changed the title to “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.”
Goldner squeezed the group into the dinner break during a recording session planned for a group called the Millionaires (vocalist Benny Nelson would later change his name to Ben E. King), backed by saxophonist Jimmy Wright and his band, Goldner’s usual studio crew.
*
They quickly cut two songs and Wright gave the group their name on their way out of the studio—he called them the Teenagers. When the record was released in January 1956 on Goldner’s new Gee label, the label read “The Teenagers featuring Frankie Lymon” and the songwriting credit read “Lymon-Santiago-Goldner.”
“Why Do Fools Fall in Love” was not just another hit record. It was a coded signal to a young generation. The youthful exuberance of the record jumped out of the speakers; it was music that couldn’t have
been made by grown-ups. In an instant, teenager Lymon and his fellow Teenagers became worldwide recording stars. Within a month of the record first hitting the charts, the Teenagers were topping the bill at sold-out Easter week concerts at the Brooklyn Paramount. By summer, they were costarring on a nationwide tour with Bill Haley and His Comets, whose number one hit the year before, “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” was the shot heard round the world.
Lymon stepped into the lead vocalist role clearly under considerable coaching from Richie Barrett, whose influence on Lymon’s phrasing is obvious. But in Lymon’s naïve bravura performance, he transformed the effervescent lead vocal into a stylistic tour de force, a defining moment for rock and roll. All over the country, young singers started taking cues from Lymon and would for years to come. But even more than the musical influence the record wielded, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” was nothing less than a declaration of independence from the New York streets.
The Teenagers’ hit tangled up in the Top Ten that April 1956 with Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” and Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” in those heady first few months of the year, as rock and roll broke wide open on the national scene. While Perkins and Presley represented the Southern side of the movement, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were the unmistakable product of New York City.
The men who made these rhythm and blues records were tough, desperate men. They were the bottom-feeders of the Midtown music world; hucksters and grifters working the far reaches of the established music business. Coarse and vulgar, they rubbed shoulders with all sorts of Broadway types, from the doubtful to the regal. They lived in a realm of their own design and they sometimes didn’t return their phone calls. These men lived in a netherworld where fearsome gangsters were their business associates, although they were never mentioned aloud, and whores were routine business expenses. The rhythm and blues racket operated many levels beneath the carriage trade record industry
represented by major labels such as Columbia, Decca, or RCA Victor. They played by different rules.
More than simply granting themselves writing credits on songs they had nothing to do with composing, they avoided paying royalties altogether. Of course, they maintained all the publishing rights. They treated performers anyway as interchangeable or disposable. Singers were like trolley cars—another one would be coming along any minute. But at the same time, all these men marveled at the magic sound of a hit record—the sound of beaver pelts slapping on the trading block—and held those associated with the feat in high regard. Stardust sparkled in their footsteps.
These men were largely unsentimental about music, but saw the record business as an opportunity. They wanted to break into a racket that had been controlled by a few major record companies since the war ended ten years before. They didn’t have stockholders and boards of directors. What they did have was moxie, some muscle, and money. And they spread it around.
Payola was more than a way of life for independent record labels and rhythm and blues broadcasters; graft, corruption, and bribery were weapons that allowed the little guys to compete with the major labels, who were somewhat more parsimonious with the $50 bills. But payola is as old as the music business. Music publisher E.B. Marks remembered greasing downtown nightclub singers in the Gay Nineties to work the catalog. Gilbert and Sullivan paid payola. During the swing era, song pluggers would routinely slip ten bucks to the Mickey Mouse bandleaders to get a chorus played. The rhythm and blues crowd simply elevated the practice.
And payola never made a hit. The public makes the hits, and if a record doesn’t have it in the grooves, it doesn’t have it. Payola can buy a chance, the opportunity, a little exposure, but it can’t turn a stiff into a hit. With the rhythm and blues field almost exclusively catering to the black audience, nobody outside their parochial little world would
have ever noticed the systemic corruption if it hadn’t been for rock and roll. And what was rock and roll anyway, other than rhythm and blues records that were sold to whites?
Rhythm and blues drove the New York independent record scene that had emerged in the years following World War II. The sleek, slinky sound of the city’s streets was making its insidious way into the antiseptic lives of Eisenhower-era white American youth. Rhythm and blues radio stations were only a spin away down the dial. With pop music just another thread in the fabric of society, it was no coincidence that the Supreme Court handed down the
Brown
decision ordering the desegregation of public schools in 1954, the same year rock and roll emerged in force. Rock and roll was the desegregation of the hit parade.
As the robust vitality of the rhythm and blues records swamped the insipid cotton candy of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window,” opportunities opened up for small labels with ears on the street. Scattered around Tenth Avenue were dozens of such independent record companies along the Street of Hope. Every so often, someone got lucky. Larry Newton’s Derby Records clicked with “Wheel of Fortune” by Eddie Wilcox and Sunny Gale in 1952. These were the kind of bottle-rocket records that kept the street humming.
Al Silver, who already ran a record pressing plant, started Herald Records in a Greenwich Village basement in 1952 and cut hit records with the Nutmegs, the Mello Kings, and the Five Satins, among others. Hy Weiss and his brother Sam started Old Town Records around the same time in a converted cloakroom at the old Triboro Theater on 125th Street and Third Avenue, taking the name from a defunct stationery company where Sam Weiss once worked so they didn’t have to buy new letterhead. They made records with the Fiestas and the Solitaires and had the first record by Richie Barrett’s Valentines a year before “Lily Maebelle.”
Jerry Blaine was a moonfaced bandleader who made some sides for Brunswick Records in the late thirties but got into the record distribution
business in the forties. His Cosnat Distributors handled most of the key independent lines in the New York City area. He worked with jazz and r&b record collector/producer Herb Abramson at National Records making Big Joe Turner records. In 1947, he bought out Abramson from their newly formed Jubilee Records. Blaine initially called his new label It’s a Natural, but retreated the next year to Jubilee when the owner of National Records complained the name was too similar.
Blaine caught a little lightning when he signed the Orioles, after watching the vocal group lose to pianist George Shearing on television’s
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts
. Formed in 1947 as the Vibranaires in Baltimore, the group was managed by a young white lady, an amateur songwriter with no professional show business experience named Deborah Chessler. The group’s 1948 recording on Blaine’s It’s A Natural label was Chessler’s song, “It’s Too Soon to Know,” a monster hit that went number one on the rhythm and blues charts and even pierced the Top Twenty on the all-white pop charts.
The record made the group a phenomenon. Mobs greeted the group’s Apollo Theater shows. By 1950, the Orioles were the most popular vocal group in the country and opened the door for the sound of the urban streets on the pop charts. Orioles vocalist Tommy Gaither died in a car crash when he fell asleep at the wheel on an endless road trip in 1950. The group was teetering on its last legs when the Orioles’ glorious cover of a gospel song by country singer Darrell Glenn, “Crying in the Chapel,” caught an updraft and sold a million as the vocal group sound swamped the charts in 1953.
George Goldner had still been doing brisk trade in Latin records on his Tico label—
timbalero
Tito Puente had become a major Latin music star under Goldner’s direction—when he decided to move into the rapidly growing rhythm and blues field in 1953. When he did, he stumbled into the biggest success of his career.
Cliff Martinez, an agent Goldner knew from the local Latin scene, brought him the Crows, a quintet from Harlem formed in 1951 that
Martinez signed after the fellows won the amateur contest at the Apollo Theater. He put the five Crows together with another client, vocalist-pianist Viola Watkins, who needed a vocal group and guitarist for her act. The Crows needed a pianist and arranger. After the first Crows single on Rama came and went, a second was released the following month in June 1953, a slow ballad written by Crows baritone Bill Davis, “I Love You So,” and “Gee,” an odd, little nothing of a song Davis also wrote that went
da-duda-da-duda-da-duda-da—Gee, I love that girl
.
When the record was first released in June 1953, Goldner pushed the ballad as the A-side. The single received some scattered attention around the country, building to the point in September where
Billboard
noted the growing interest in the flip side. Then Huggy Boy had the fight with his girl.
Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg, Los Angeles’ top nighttime deejay, broadcast his KRKD show nightly from the front window of Dolphin’s of Hollywood, a popular all-night record store in the middle of black Los Angeles, at the corner of Vernon and Central Avenues. He and his girlfriend had a fight and she left to drive home across town to North Hollywood. He put on her favorite record, “Gee,” and kept playing it until she got home and called. She worried that he would be fired if he didn’t stop playing the record and he said he wouldn’t stop until she agreed to come back. She did, but the damage had been done.
The next Tuesday, Goldner called the disc jockey to tell him he had made “Gee” a smash. Within weeks, “Gee” sold more than fifty thousand records in Los Angeles alone and was rapidly spreading across the country. By January, Goldner had not only sold a lot of records, but also landed high on the pop charts, rarified air for rhythm and blues records. Using a patchwork network of independent distributors, tirelessly working the phones himself with disc jockeys and record retailers, Goldner proved it possible for a New York independent label to have a nationwide hit.
However, he was also losing so much at the racetrack, he sold the publishing on his hit song to Meridian Music for what the trades described as “a lot of money.” Meridian Music was one of a number of publishing companies owned by Morris Levy.
For the rest of his life, Morris Levy would loom as an ominous figure over the Broadway music trade, a lifelong handmaiden to mobsters, a bully to anyone who did business with him, and the black-bag man behind the scenes of the record business. The FBI always figured Levy as the front man for the syndicate in the record business, and that was not without a certain basis in fact. At the same time, Levy was not a scary, threatening figure—he knew those people—but a wisecracking, avuncular
yiddishe macher
. He kept his finger in every part of the music business. He owned nightclubs. He promoted tours. He loaned money to musicians. He had music publishing.
