Tearing Down the Wall of Sound by Mick Brown Page A

later, working the “music row” around Sunset and Vine peopled with chancers and flimflam men, raw opportunists and rough diamonds. Typical was the music publisher Harry Goodman, brother of the clarinet player Benny—a man, Leiber remembers, who dressed like a Savile Row dandy, spoke “like a Brooklyn butcher” and held court in an office engulfed in the aroma of marijuana fumes.
    â€œThe first time we met him, we went over there and asked, ‘Can we play you some songs, Mr. Goodman?’ And he says, ‘What else do you think I’m here for?’ So Mike, very tentatively, walks over to the piano and sits down and one, two, three…And Harry says, ‘These are the lyrics here?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And then he says, ‘What’s your name?’ And I said, ‘Jerry.’ And he says, ‘Jerry, I’m going to tell you something. That song you just sang is a piece of shit.’ And he’s got a wastepaper basket there and he throws the lyrics in the can. ‘Let’s go on to the next one.’ And he does this five or six times and then finally we get to a song, and he says, ‘This is a
real
pile of shit—but it’s the kind of shit that I need.’”
    Gradually, Leiber and Stoller began to place their songs with RB artists such as Amos Milburn, Jimmy Witherspoon and Charles Brown. Their first significant hit came with “Hound Dog,” recorded by Big Mama Thornton, which topped the RB charts for seven weeks in 1953. It would also provide the writers with a timely lesson in music business practice. The producer on the session was the local bandleader Johnny Otis. When the record was released, Leiber and Stoller were disconcerted to find that Otis had added his name to the writers’ credits, and mortified when the record company, Duke, stopped payment on a royalty check. Bruised by the experience, Leiber and Stoller set up their own publishing company, Quintet Music, and their own record label, Spark, in partnership with Lester Sill. Their first signing was a local RB group named the Robins, for whom Leiber and Stoller wrote a series of songs—“Riot in Cell Block No. 9,” “Framed” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”—which Leiber and Stoller termed “playlets,” vivid narrative songs, performed in a humorous, knockabout style that would become one of the songwriters’ trademarks.
    While only local hits, their work with the Robins brought them to the attention of Atlantic Records in New York. Founded in 1948 by two Turkish-born brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, Atlantic had established itself as one of the most successful independent RB labels in America. In 1955 Nesuhi Ertegun approached Leiber and Stoller with a proposition: Atlantic should buy out Spark, and Leiber and Stoller move to New York and make records for Atlantic as independent writer-producers—an unheard-of arrangement in the record business at that time. Under the deal, Atlantic would pay for all the sessions and give the pair a 2 percent royalty on sales. Crucially, Leiber and Stoller also insisted that they should receive a label credit as producers on all their work—another unprecedented move. Atlantic quibbled over the use of the word “producers.” “They wanted to call us directors,” Leiber remembers. “They said they were the producers because they put up the money.” But Leiber and Stoller prevailed.
    Their first Atlantic recordings were with established Atlantic artists such as Joe Turner, LaVern Baker and Ruth Brown. For the Coasters—a revamped version of the Robins—the pair crafted a further series of comic “mini operettas,” such as “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” “Along Came Jones” and “Little Egypt,” honking vaudevillian RB songs with lyrics that aligned the group firmly on the side of their teenage audience by