Here Comes the Night (26 page)

Kirshner, who was not yet thirty years old and was now a millionaire, built a large, impressive corner office for himself, a far cry from the homey cubby he used to occupy with the red piano and the honor roll of hits on the wall. From someone who had made so much of Aldon being a family, who had used his personal relationship with the writers to get them to sign extensions on their contracts, the sudden, secret sale seemed like a betrayal. Most of the top writers never even set foot in the tony new office.

JERRY LEIBER TRIPPED
across the last great songwriting team Leiber and Stoller would find by accident in his own Brill Building office. It was a case of mistaken identity. Leiber thought Carole King was the loudest piano player he had ever heard. When he wandered into one of the cubicles at Trio Music and glimpsed the back of a young lady
banging away extra loud at one of the pianos, he didn’t really look to see who it was. “Carole,” he said.

Eleanor Louise Greenwich was a twenty-two-year-old who quit teaching high school to write songs. She was at the Leiber and Stoller office meeting a friend, who had stepped out for a few minutes and left her alone with the piano. Leiber introduced himself, listened to her song, and made a few suggestions. He told her that she could use the Trio office anytime she liked, as long as she gave them first look at anything she wrote. When she went home to her parents’ house in Levittown and found out who he was, the young blonde was beside herself.

She had moved when she was seven years old with her family to builder Bill Levitt’s experiment in affordable middle-class housing on Long Island when the trees were freshly planted, the very beginning of postwar suburbia, twenty miles outside New York City. Her Catholic father was a failed painter turned electrical engineer and her Jewish mother ran the women’s department of a J.C. Penney’s. They celebrated both Easter and Seder at different aunts’ homes. Her father played balalaika and she picked up the accordion at an early age.

She listened to Alan Freed’s radio show in her bedroom and bought 45s avidly at the nearby record store in Hicksville. Her mother arranged the meeting with Arthur Godfrey bandleader Archie Bleyer, who ran Cadence Records and made records with Godfrey’s boy tenor, Julius LaRosa (Bleyer counseled the teenage girl to finish school before trying the music business). But it was through the Hicksville record store owner that Greenwich wound up with RCA Victor, who released a single of her singing two songs she wrote while she was a freshman music major at Queens College in 1958. Her music teacher was not impressed. She changed majors and graduated from Hofstra University, where she reigned as Spring Queen, then went to work teaching high school, a delicious prospect sabotaged by reality. She left the job after three weeks and started lurking around the Brill Building, selling occasional songs for thirty-five or fifty bucks, sometimes more.

Paul Case of Hill & Range introduced her to Doc Pomus and they wrote a couple of songs together. Case had been trying out a number of different collaborators with Pomus. His customary partner, Morty Shuman, flush with success, dressed like a country squire and rode around with an endless procession of new girlfriends in a hip little convertible British sports car. Shuman smoked Gitanes and changed apartments frequently. He left the country at every opportunity. Doc still spent weekdays at the Hotel Forrest and weekends in Long Island with his family. Pomus and Greenwich didn’t get much going, although their “Who Are You Gonna Love This Winter (Mr. Lifeguard)” made a little noise in Scandinavia.

Leiber and Stoller’s Trio Music was no song factory. The company existed primarily to publish their own work, but they kept a few writers around to help knock out material for the teenage market such as Tony Powers. Like Greenwich, Powers had been one of those kids on the sidewalk outside the Brill Building, until he managed to bluff his way into a publishing office. He caught a hit with “Remember Then” by the Earls, a catchy little number that played off the oldies but goodies wrinkle of 1962, nostalgia for a recent past that was some of the first evidence rock and roll was developing a literature of its own.

Powers and Greenwich started writing together and sold a song to Aaron Schroeder, after giving Leiber and Stoller first look. Schroeder thought the song might be right for Phil Spector, “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry.” Schroeder previously gave Spector “He’s a Rebel,” the number one Crystals hit written by Schroeder client Gene Pitney, so he arranged a meeting between the songwriters and the producer.

While Ellie Greenwich played “That Was Me Yesterday” for Spector in her cubicle at Trio Music, Spector barely paid attention. He kept checking a mirror on the wall. He left the room. He fixed his hair. He made little noises. Greenwich blew up and chewed him out (“you little prick”). Spector stormed out in a fury. A couple of weeks later, he finally heard the demo to “(Today I Met) The Boy
I’m Gonna Marry,” and summoned the writers through their publisher. Powers and Greenwich cooled their heels for several hours in the lobby of the apartment building at Sixty-Second Street and York, where Spector lived in the penthouse and kept an office off the lobby. When Spector finally did show up and Greenwich gave him hell again, he remembered her from Leiber and Stoller’s offices. This time, they hit it off.

Spector recorded both “The Boy I’m Gonna Marry” and their “Why Do Lovers Break Each Other’s Hearts” at the same session in October 1962 in Los Angeles. Studio vocalist Darlene Wright, who sang lead on the Crystals records beginning with “He’s a Rebel,” sang both. “Why Do Lovers Break Each Other’s Hearts” became the next single by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans and “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry” was the first solo single by Wright, whom Spector renamed Darlene Love for the occasion.

Leiber and Stoller cut a couple of their songs. They used “This Is It” as the follow-up to “She Cried” for Jay and the Americans, though it failed to chart. They took Greenwich and Powers’s “He’s Got the Power” into a marathon session at Bell Sound for the Exciters, intended to produce an album and a new single to follow the Top Ten success of Berns’s “Tell Him.” Also among the handful of songs they were going to cut that night was “Get Him,” a song Berns and Passman had on Dottie Clark the year before as “Get Him Alone.” Leiber and Stoller gave it a facelift along the lines of “Tell Him,” giving it the inside track as the most obvious follow-up (especially considering that Leiber and Stoller were now also participants in the song’s copyright).

Greenwich was still living at home in Long Island and her father drove her to the session, which ran long past midnight. Sometime just before dawn, Leiber and Stoller came out of the booth and told Greenwich her song would be the next single. She woke up her sleeping father, who drove the elated young lady home before turning around and driving back to work in Manhattan. She soon signed a deal
with Trio Music, negotiating Leiber and Stoller’s original $50 a week offer to $100 a week.

She met Jeff Barry at a family Thanksgiving in 1959, but they didn’t start working together for several years. That first night, she brought her accordion to the dinner. He brought his wife. They made music together. His wife was not pleased. Barry was working as a songwriter for E.B. Marks publishers, having temporarily shelved his own ambitions as a singer. She was fascinated. He was attracted. His latest single was titled “Lenore,” after his wife, but the flip was “Why Does the Feeling Go Away.”

Barry was born Joel Adelberg. His father was blind and his sister was mentally retarded. His father made a good living selling insurance over the phone. He took the spring out of the rotary dial and could make calls at lightning speed. When his parents divorced, his mother refused any money and took the two children, along with her father, to live in her mailman brother’s attic. Back in Brooklyn four years later, the four of them crowded into a one-bedroom apartment.

He was a funny, dreamy kid who watched too many cowboy movies. He sang on the street corner and, after a stint in the Army Reserve following high school, he entered City College to study industrial design. Before long he dropped out of NYCC to try his luck as a singer and changed his name to Jeff Barry. A family connection won him an audition with Arnold Shaw of E.B. Marks. Barry, who could play only two chords on the piano, knew only his own songs to sing. Shaw asked him about the songs and Barry confessed he knew only G and C. Shaw asked him if ever considered a career in songwriting and offered him a $75-a-week job.

He wrote “Tell Laura I Love Her” with Ben Raleigh, an older songwriter around the Brill Building. Barry originally envisioned the teenage car crash song as a horse opera. He rewrote the song when it was pointed out to him that teenagers didn’t care about horses; teens liked cars. Texan singer Ray Peterson, a ninety-eight-pound polio victim in
leg braces, made a Top Ten hit in summer 1960 out of the sob song, not to mention ushering in a slew of other teen death records.

Barry left E.B. Marks on West Fifty-Second Street for Trinity Music at the Brill Building in March 1961. Over the next couple of years, Barry would have almost a hundred other songs recorded without ever coming close to having that kind of hit again, until he started writing with Ellie Greenwich.

Their personal relationship warmed. Barry would bring records over to Levittown. She would take the train into the city and sing on his demos. She quickly became a favored demo singer with her crisp, clear tones and brisk efficiency in the studio. She and Barry produced a novelty side, “Red Corvette,” under the name Ellie Gee and the Jets. But Greenwich was leery of using her boyfriend to make it in the music business. She wanted to succeed on her own terms. Ensconced in the bosom of Trio Music, watched over by the lions of Broadway, Leiber and Stoller, she felt secure. She and Barry were married October 28, 1962, in a lavish party at Leonard’s, the elegant prom date restaurant in Great Neck where every princess from Long Island wanted to stage her wedding. Berns led everybody on the dance floor in the hitch hike. He had hosted the bachelor party the night before at his penthouse: booze, cigars, and stag films.

Barry, meanwhile, turned down an offer from Bobby Darin, who had acquired Trinity Music and wanted Barry to move to Hollywood and manage the publishing firm, which Darin renamed TM Music. Barry flew to California and Darin wined him and dined him. But even after hanging out with Hugh Hefner in Tony Curtis’s cottage on a Hollywood movie set, Barry came home and accepted a much lower offer to sign with Trio Music. He knew Leiber and Stoller were the top men in the field and the opportunity was not lost on him. It only remained for Barry and Greenwich to break the news to their respective songwriting collaborators. They had successfully kept their romance under wraps and the news came as a sullen surprise to Tony Powers, for one.
The newlyweds returned to their own cubicle in the Trio offices, their names on the door and leather chairs waiting for them inside.

Greenwich introduced her new collaborator to Spector and the three of them locked themselves in Spector’s Sixty-Second Street office for two days, Greenwich pounding on a piano, Spector strumming a guitar, urgently coming up with a new song for the Crystals. Spector had quickly pulled the group’s first follow-up to the number one “He’s a Rebel” after radio instantly rejected the bizarre Goffin and King song, “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss),” which was, strangely enough, inspired by their babysitter, Eva Boyd, before she became Little Eva and cut “The Loco-Motion.” Apparently, she showed up for work one day sporting a black eye and a big smile. “He loves me,” she told Goffin.

Working on writing the new song at Spector’s office, when promotion man Bill Walsh stopped by, the songwriters wrote him into the opening couplet:
Somebody told me his name was Bill
. Barry and Greenwich had used some nonsense syllables as a placeholder until they could think of the chorus line, but Spector insisted the line stay and “Da Doo Ron Ron” was finished. Spector cut the song with Darlene Love on lead vocals, but reconsidered and brought in fifteen-year-old LaLa Brooks, one of the girls who actually belonged to the Crystals and who had never been kissed. Her unmistakable innocence was dramatically juxtaposed on the final production against the thunderous, explosive volley from Spector’s Hollywood sidemen, led by the detonating tom-toms of drummer Hal Blaine.

The Top Five smash was the first of nine chart hits that Barry and Greenwich would write for various artists on Spector’s Philles Records over the next sixteen months, records that would make Spector a towering figure in his little world and Barry and Greenwich the leading songwriters of the year.

They sketched out a song riding the train to town from their apartment in LeFrak City, the massive new housing development on the edge of Queens where they moved after they married. They went straight
into Associated Recording that morning and, in a little more than an hour, cut a demo of the song “What a Guy.” Greenwich sang the vocal and overdubbed the harmonies. Barry added a few
dip dips
. Jerry Leiber heard something he liked in the demo and insisted they let him sell the recording as-is to Jerry Blaine’s Jubilee Records. He offered the pair a whopping 5 percent royalty, a good two points above the usual. What Barry and Greenwich didn’t know was that Leiber and Stoller were collecting 16 percent from Blaine and splitting it with Barry’s publisher. Both publishers were making more than the songwriter-artists. They called the group the Raindrops and the record made its way up to the middle of the charts. Still Greenwich was astonished to see the first royalty check for $28,000, having no idea how much her publishers were pocketing. They hired a couple of other girls (including teenager Beverly Warren, who cut Greenwich’s “That Was Me Yesterday” with Berns) and another guy because Barry was stage shy and made the rounds on weekends lip-synching the song on TV shows and package concert bills.

Unlike Leiber and Stoller, who were older and came into the music from rhythm and blues, Barry and Greenwich actually belonged to the audience for their music; a shade on the older side, but they were both rock and roll children. They wrote songs that reflected the basic innocence and optimism of teenage life because they were fresh from its glow and unspoiled by cynicism and greed.