Here Comes the Night by Joel Selvin Page B

where a photographer took a crackerjack shot of Hickey, leg cocked sideways, his guitar pointing ahead like a lance, and put him in touch with Mike Corda, a sometime songwriter and personal manager who handled Italian pop singer Enzo Stuarti. They cut a demo version of “Bluebirds” that wobbled along on a quirky, awkward rhythm and lasted only a minute and a half. But they knew they had something special, something that in its own tiny way was perfect. They leased the master to Epic Records, where Corda had previously placed Stuarti.
    In 1958, however, the stripped-down rock and roll sound was on the way out, and although “Bluebirds” struggled up the charts, fighting its way to number seventy-five, it was a battle to go that far. Hickey was in the hands of New York–based major label executives, not Memphis good ole boys who might have understood his down-to-earth rock androll sound better. By the time Hickey was set to record his third single for the label, a subsidiary of stodgy Columbia Records, he was given the choice of two songs written by Alley old-timer Al Lewis, who cowrote “Blueberry Hill” in 1940. Lewis had also recently scored with “Tears on My Pillow” by Little Anthony and the Imperials and formed a publishing venture with up-and-coming music publisher Don Kirshner. Both demos were sung by Kirshner’s songwriting partner, Bobby Darin. Hickey picked “You Never Can Tell” and went nowhere. Fats Domino, who had done so well with his version of “Blueberry Hill,” took “I’m Ready” and sailed into the Top Twenty.
    Like Lane, Hickey wrote a couple of songs with Berns that did nothing. But Berns loved knowing Ersel. A jubilant Berns burst into Hickey’s Brill Building office one morning, waving the album just released by Mexican American rocker Ritchie Valens, who had died that February 1959 in the same plane crash that killed the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly. The Valens hit “La Bamba,” with its familiar C-F-G-F progression rooted deeply in the Latin sound that fascinated Berns, was his current favorite song. “Look,” he told Hickey, “you’re right next to ‘La Bamba.’” And, yes, Valens’s version of “Bluebirds” was the second cut on the album, immediately following “La Bamba.”
    But Berns was getting nowhere. He ran through Ed Feldman’s money. His girlfriend grew tired of his mouthful of promises. When they were threatened with eviction, his cousin Burt Gordon, by now a practicing attorney in Manhattan, made a couple of convincing phone calls to stall the landlord. But when the rent was still not forthcoming, Rita and Bert went sneaking out in the middle of the night from the dump with the fake fireplace and the kitchen in the hallway, carrying what few possessions they had. For Rita, it was the end. Exasperated at his endless stream of schemes and plans for the future, she no longer believed Bert. She never really liked his music, another jazz snob looking down her nose at rock and roll. She decided he would never make it and split for Florida without him.
    Bert was disconsolate. He pleaded his case over the long-distance wires, promising changes, asking her to marry him. But Rita stayed in Florida. Losing his girlfriend and the apartment was one thing, but he also couldn’t pay the rent on his office at 1650. Herbie Wasserman liked Bert—everybody did—but he also thought he was a semitalented know-nothing who was never going to amount to anything. But then Wasserman also thought of rock and roll as children’s music. He wasn’t above putting something together called “Rebel Yell” with trumpet and tympani and grown men going “Whoop! Whoop!” He would do that (and even managed to sell it to a label), but he didn’t have to like it. Berns actually liked the stuff.
    Berns managed to ingratiate himself with Russ Miller, who worked next door as office manager for Robert Mellin Music. Bobby Mellin was an old-time music publisher who wrote some pretty big