Here Comes the Night by Joel Selvin Page A
Authors: Joel Selvin
Tags: music, History & Criticism
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would be the big breakthrough. American history was hot on the hit parade at the moment with Johnny Horton taking “The Battle of New Orleans” to the top of the charts. With a little rat-ta-tat martial drumming mixed in behind the rock and roll beat, these two wacky guys half sang, half recited “Four score and seven years ago . . . ” They even managed to convince Bob Thiele, a big shot at Decca Records who had resurrected his old Signature label, to put the thing out.
Thiele might have known better. He was a record producer who had started a label as a teenager living in Forest Hills, recording classic jazz by veterans such as Coleman Hawkins and James P. Johnson. He folded the company in the midfifties when he went to Decca, where he hit it big with a string of square pop hits by Teresa Brewer, the McGuire Sisters, and Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy.” He started to dabble in rockand roll, signing Buddy Holly and Jackie Wilson. He resurrected his Signature label in 1959 with records by TV host Steve Allen, but even Thiele, hot as he was, didn’t have a clue.
In short order, Thiele pumped out records on his label aimed at the pop field from every imaginable direction. Among the more than two dozen records he released that year were numbers by Lawrence Welk’s musical director George Cates (with whom Thiele had a huge 1956 hit for Decca on “Moonglow and the Theme from ‘Picnic’”), Steve Allen and his wife Jayne Meadows, r&b singer Jimmy Ricks of the Ravens, monologist Eddie (“The Old Philosopher”) Lawrence, and rock and roller Arch Hall Jr., whose storied B-movie career was preceded by “Monkey in My Hatband” on Signature. Thiele hadn’t found the mark with any of the singles he put out on Signature the first year back in business. “The Gettysburg Address” by Bert and Bill Giant was no exception, just another idiotic crack at breaking into the hit single field that went nowhere, cooked up at 1650 Broadway. *
The place was crummy with characters. Mickey Lee Lane was born Sholom Schreiber, an eighteen-year-old kid with chutzpah who wandered the halls of 1650, knocking on doors. Berns liked the little motor-mouth Jew rock and roller whose father was a cantor and traveling salesman. Rock and roll crazy, Lane used to take the train from Long Island with his sister Shonnie into Manhattan and dance on the Alan Freed rock and roll TV show. Tired of the home recordings he made on his father’s Webcor tape deck, he pawned his elaborate electric train set to pay for a full-fledged session downtown. He and his sister released a single, “Toasted Love,” on the Brunswick subsidiary of Decca in 1958, and Lane had been haunting the hallways of Broadway music business office buildings ever since, when he wandered into Berns’s lair and played him some of his home recordings.
Lane hung out at Berns’s office every time he came to the city. He played piano on demo sessions for Berns. Sometimes he supplied handclaps and sometimes he just watched. He wound up writing a song called “Don’t Stop” with Bert and Ray Passman, which Passman published, although the song was never recorded. They did make a demo of Lane’s own “All I Want to Do Is Dance,” and when Lane showed Bert another song he had written, Bert switched a few lines around, tossed off a couple of new lyrics, and added his name as cowriter to the song, “I Want to Be Loved,” not that there was any stampede to record that either.
Ersel Hickey, another Broadway character whom Berns wrote a couple of songs with, was somewhat better known. His 1959 hit “Bluebirds over the Mountain” may not have climbed that far up the national charts, but New York radio treated it like a number one smash. Hickey kept an office a couple of blocks down the street in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, the big music business office building at West Forty-Ninth Street and Broadway.
The twenty-five-year-old rocker came from upstate New York, near Rochester,
Thiele might have known better. He was a record producer who had started a label as a teenager living in Forest Hills, recording classic jazz by veterans such as Coleman Hawkins and James P. Johnson. He folded the company in the midfifties when he went to Decca, where he hit it big with a string of square pop hits by Teresa Brewer, the McGuire Sisters, and Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy.” He started to dabble in rockand roll, signing Buddy Holly and Jackie Wilson. He resurrected his Signature label in 1959 with records by TV host Steve Allen, but even Thiele, hot as he was, didn’t have a clue.
In short order, Thiele pumped out records on his label aimed at the pop field from every imaginable direction. Among the more than two dozen records he released that year were numbers by Lawrence Welk’s musical director George Cates (with whom Thiele had a huge 1956 hit for Decca on “Moonglow and the Theme from ‘Picnic’”), Steve Allen and his wife Jayne Meadows, r&b singer Jimmy Ricks of the Ravens, monologist Eddie (“The Old Philosopher”) Lawrence, and rock and roller Arch Hall Jr., whose storied B-movie career was preceded by “Monkey in My Hatband” on Signature. Thiele hadn’t found the mark with any of the singles he put out on Signature the first year back in business. “The Gettysburg Address” by Bert and Bill Giant was no exception, just another idiotic crack at breaking into the hit single field that went nowhere, cooked up at 1650 Broadway. *
The place was crummy with characters. Mickey Lee Lane was born Sholom Schreiber, an eighteen-year-old kid with chutzpah who wandered the halls of 1650, knocking on doors. Berns liked the little motor-mouth Jew rock and roller whose father was a cantor and traveling salesman. Rock and roll crazy, Lane used to take the train from Long Island with his sister Shonnie into Manhattan and dance on the Alan Freed rock and roll TV show. Tired of the home recordings he made on his father’s Webcor tape deck, he pawned his elaborate electric train set to pay for a full-fledged session downtown. He and his sister released a single, “Toasted Love,” on the Brunswick subsidiary of Decca in 1958, and Lane had been haunting the hallways of Broadway music business office buildings ever since, when he wandered into Berns’s lair and played him some of his home recordings.
Lane hung out at Berns’s office every time he came to the city. He played piano on demo sessions for Berns. Sometimes he supplied handclaps and sometimes he just watched. He wound up writing a song called “Don’t Stop” with Bert and Ray Passman, which Passman published, although the song was never recorded. They did make a demo of Lane’s own “All I Want to Do Is Dance,” and when Lane showed Bert another song he had written, Bert switched a few lines around, tossed off a couple of new lyrics, and added his name as cowriter to the song, “I Want to Be Loved,” not that there was any stampede to record that either.
Ersel Hickey, another Broadway character whom Berns wrote a couple of songs with, was somewhat better known. His 1959 hit “Bluebirds over the Mountain” may not have climbed that far up the national charts, but New York radio treated it like a number one smash. Hickey kept an office a couple of blocks down the street in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, the big music business office building at West Forty-Ninth Street and Broadway.
The twenty-five-year-old rocker came from upstate New York, near Rochester,
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