Here Comes the Night (43 page)

Carmine (“Wassel”) DeNoia, Patsy Pagano, Bert Berns on his boat,
A Little Bit of Soap
.

XIX.

Are You Lonely for Me Baby
[1966]

C
ARMINE DENOIA—WASSEL—
knew Berns from when Berns was still scuffling and Wassel was making book on Broadway, but Wassel checked Berns out anyway before signing Freddie Scott with Bang. Wassel had admired Berns’s spleen when he first met him eating at a diner at Broadway and Fifty-Third Street with some of the boys, Hy Weiss and Miltie Ross, when Berns told Wassel, “You don’t know me well enough yet—I’ll let you know when you can say ‘You’re my man.’” Freddie Scott was an older guy, graduated college, some med school, sang gospel, did a tour of military duty, cut a couple of records, and wrote a few songs before Don Kirshner hired him to write with Helen Miller, coauthor of the Shirelles hit “Foolish Little Girl.” Scott and Miller had songs they wrote recorded by Paul Anka and Gene Chandler, but when Goffin and King asked Scott’s help putting a lead vocal on a song intended for Chuck Jackson, his demo of their “Hey Girl” turned out so well, Goffin took Scott back in the studio and polished the track into a master for Colpix, the Screen Gems label, and scored a Top Ten hit in 1963. His follow-up was a daring, slow cover of the Ray Charles hit “I Got a Woman.”

Without anybody informing him, Scott suddenly found himself with a new manager, Wassel, taking over from his previous manager, and a new record label, Columbia Records, which directed the
magnificent vocalist to bland middle-of-the-road fare under the supervision of Brook Benton producer Clyde Otis. Still, inside the small world of New York rhythm and blues, Freddie Scott was rated as one of the finest vocalists on the scene.

When Wassel negotiated Scott’s release from Columbia, one of the label’s lawyers told Wassel he would think about it. “Don’t sit on it too long,” Wassel said, “or you’ll have three holes in your ass.”

Nat Tarnopol at the Mob-infected Brunswick Records offered Wassel serious money for Scott, but Wassel had a good feeling about this guy Berns. He already placed one of his other clients, the Exciters, with Berns after pulling the group off Roulette. Wassel hated Morris Levy, a touchy situation because Levy was a close friend of Wassel’s brother. That Levy hadn’t paid the kids in the group a penny only inflamed Wassel’s sense of injustice. He once used iron bars rolled up in newspapers to bust up the office of a recalcitrant music publisher to encourage proper accounting on behalf of a client. The Exciters went with Wassel for one reason, because they noticed that Freddie Scott got paid. Wassel may have cashed in cartons of illicit free goods, but after he signed with Columbia, Freddie Scott was driving a new gold Cadillac Fleetwood.

Wassel became a part of the furniture at the Bang Records office. Berns adored the goofy oaf with his colorfully mangled English. He was a jolly, gentle giant. Under the right circumstances, Wassel could be threatening and even dangerous, but he was more character than torpedo. He didn’t have a police record (although the FBI knew who he was). If people mistook him for a mobster, they weren’t far wrong. Those guys all knew Wassel and he was especially close to the Paganos, Joey even more than Patsy maybe, but Joey was away in prison for some time to come. Wassel might not have been part of their operation. Certainly he would have never hesitated to do any favor they asked. Wassel knew how to mind his own business. Through Wassel, Berns came to know Patsy Pagano. He and Ilene socialized
with Patsy and his wife, Laura. The couples had even taken cruises on Berns’s new boat.

The forty-foot, steel-hulled Chris Craft was christened
A Little Bit of Soap
, and Berns berthed the unwieldy beast at the Seventy-Ninth Street boat basin. He knew nothing about seamanship, but he had tooled around enough with Wexler on his boat to think it couldn’t be that difficult. He took a quick maritime course at City College and it was full speed ahead. Jeff Barry watched as Berns ripped a huge gash in some poor sucker’s hull trying to dock his boat. An embarrassed Berns stayed below while the irate boat owner screamed bloody murder. Berns kept guns onboard and every so often would blast away at seagulls with a shotgun like a big kid.

Nobody knows when Berns met Tommy Eboli, but they quickly became such fast friends that Eboli bought a steel-hulled Chris Craft exactly like Berns’s and kept his boat in the adjacent slip. Eboli invited Berns and his wife to dinner at his modest family apartment in Fort Lee. Ilene didn’t fully appreciate their new friend’s standing until she and Berns accompanied the boss on a stroll through Little Italy’s San Gennaro Street during an Italian Day parade and she watched people, one after another, come up and kiss his ring. Eboli and Berns spent a lot of time hanging out on each other’s boats. Jeff Barry didn’t know what to think when Eboli looked over his shoulder at the helicopter that had been hovering in the distance the whole time they sat around the boat, tied to the dock. “FBI,” Eboli said, and shrugged.

Eboli certainly knew he was under constant surveillance. He was one of the kingpin Mob bosses of New York City. When the Feds finally framed Vito Genovese and he went off to Atlanta in 1959 for fifteen years, Genovese left Eboli and another boss in charge of family affairs, with his consiglieri also minding matters. The leadership of New York’s families had been in constant turmoil since Lucky Luciano tried to impose his will on them all from exile in Havana. Luciano was repudiated and sent back to Italy to live out his life like Napoleon in Elba
by Vito Genovese, at least in part, who was also presumed behind—far behind—both the shooting of Frank Costello and the bloody massacre of Albert Anastasia, riddled with slugs while he dozed off getting a haircut and a manicure in the barbershop at the Park Sheraton.

Joe Bonanno, the last of the old bosses, showed back up in May 1966 after having been missing since October 1964, when he may have staged his own kidnapping outside his attorney’s Park Avenue apartment building. He may have wanted to avoid testifying before a federal grand jury the next morning or he may have been beating the heat from the other bosses after he lost a power grab when boss Joe Profaci died in 1962. Ambitious Carlo Gambino and his ally Thomas “Three-Fingered Brown” Lucchese were strong with Cosa Nostra’s ruling body, the inviolate Commission. But Lucchese was sick now, cancer eating him away, and the power was sure to shift again when he died. Lousy FBI wiretaps and stakeouts were the least of Tommy Eboli’s concerns. But boats did offer a certain freedom from electronic surveillance that he no doubt enjoyed, cruising the Hudson with Berns and his music business pals.

The battle with Atlantic drained Berns. He was visibly nervous and sweaty. He sought treatment from a Park Avenue psychiatrist specializing in holocaust victims named Dr. Max Needleman. He was afraid of dying. When songwriter Artie Wayne underwent open-heart surgery at New York Medical Center, Berns quizzed him intensely about the procedure once Wayne was back on his feet, crawling the halls again at 1650. Wayne could tell that his fears about it ran so deep, they permeated every part of his thought process. He urged Berns to have the surgery, but Berns feared the operation would kill him.

He saw more heart specialists. He saw Dr. Needleman. He gulped medicine. He carried nitroglycerin pills in case of an incident. His nails were chewed to the quick. He sometimes clutched his chest and winced in pain. He scared Ilene, collapsing on their couch in the middle of a fight—she could see his heart pounding through his chest.
He frightened Brooks Arthur and Brooks’s wife, Marilyn, driving back from upstate with Ilene in Berns’s Jaguar XKE, when he had an attack. He turned white and burst into a sweat. He had to put a bag over his mouth and breathe, but he refused to give up the wheel and drove all the way back with his face in a paper bag. Berns was afraid of the risky experimental open-heart surgery that was being done at only a few hospitals, but he ordered the artificial valve and kept it on hand to help build up his nerve.

With Ilene pregnant again, their second child due in February, Berns rented his family a new home across the river in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, a suburban two-story house on a tree-lined street—Tommy Dowd lived in the neighborhood—while Berns started to make plans to build his own home in the area. Dino the Great Dane, who spent his life in a Manhattan penthouse, knew nothing about traffic. Somehow, he got loose from the house and was hit by a car in the street. When the veterinarian put a cast on the dog’s leg, the open sores would not heal. Berns sat by the dog, sponged his wounds, and cried. It took him days to realize he had to put the dog to sleep. His heart was broken.

With all this
mishegas
, Berns had been out of the studio for months. His label needed records and he threw himself back into recording. With Sam Cooke imitator Bobby Harris, Berns cut a pair of new high-grade Bert Berns originals. “Sticky, Sticky” was a polished, commercial dance number with a Stax/Volt finish, a smooth piece of pop that even referenced “Hang On Sloopy” in the lyrics. But “Mr. Success” was dark soul that would have been fine for Solomon Burke. Harris, a veteran of more than a dozen previous records on various New York independents including a mawkish Sam Cooke tribute on Atlantic the year before, gave the songs a throaty roar. Berns did another one of his heartbreak soul ballads, “Gone Gone,” with Roy C., who hit the r&b charts the year before with his own cracked soul side, “Shotgun Wedding.” “Gone Gone” echoed Berns’s growing fascination with Southern soul.

Seymour Stein, a promotion man for Red Bird, ran across a single on Chess breaking out in a few markets in the Midwest and played it for his pal, Richard Gottehrer. “Searching for My Love” by Bobby Moore and the Rhythm Aces, a snaking, smoky midtempo soul grinder, was recorded at Muscle Shoals, the first record by a veteran combo out of Montgomery, Alabama. Gottehrer and Stein gave the record to Berns, and the next time they saw him, he dragged them into his office to show them what he did with that record. He sat at the piano and pounded out the same song as he started to sing “Are You Lonely for Me Baby.”

Berns grafted his song on top of authentic Southern soul—he even located the song’s lyrics in the South (the
last train to Jacksonville . . .
). It was exactly what Berns needed for Freddie Scott. Arranger Garry Sherman pushed the stately pace with a groaning horn section, the production a little richer, a little more glossy perhaps than the Southern version, but Berns had unlocked the door to the world of soul.

His album with Arsenio Rodriguez was a joyous, festive labor of love. Rodriguez, who revolutionized Cuban music before the Second World War and lays claim to inventing the mambo, first left Cuba for Miami in the early fifties, but discouraged by the racism he encountered, relocated in the South Bronx, where the father of Afro-Cuban music stayed out of the limelight. He maintained his
conjunto
for a number of years, but he struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing waters of Latin music. He did an intriguing, almost folkloric session for Blue Note in 1957 with conga drummer Sabu as the leader. With five Cuban drummers on the session, Rodriguez, whose grandfather was a Yoruban slave who taught Arsenio all the ancient ways, led the ensemble on a succession of pure African chants.

George Goldner recorded him for Tico in the early sixties, but he was collecting dust when Berns found him. With Artie Butler arranging and Brooks Arthur behind the board, Berns brought Arsenio and his entire band into A&R Studios and cut a textbook Cuban album.
The great Cuban bassist Cachao, one of the fathers of the mambo, and Machito’s
bongosero
Jose Mangual played on the session. Amid the shimmering brass and bright, sensuous rhythms, the clattering of Arsenio’s
tres
—he was a master of the three-stringed instrument—percolated like horses’ hooves on a dirt road.

Berns brought his “My Girl Sloopy” full circle with Arsenio’s band giving the song a complete Afro-Cuban retooling, Arsenio wobbling his way through the lyric in thickly accented English (
Sloopy muchacha
), a minor masterpiece that would land Arsenio Rodriguez on radio station playlists for the last time in his historic career.

Berns then unleashed the second single by Neil Diamond on Bang, “Cherry, Cherry.” He sent Jeff Barry back in the studio to put a spit shine on the original demo. The drumless track swung like mad and Diamond’s vocal—supported by a raft of trademark overdubbed Ellie Greenwich background vocals—carried the record. The fully produced version turned out stilted, crowded with musical ideas. With the ghost of “La Bamba” hovering over the Latin-flavored pop song, “Cherry Cherry” was a record that had Bert Berns all over it. “Dance-beat disk of the week,” said
Billboard
. Berns went to work on radio across the country.

“Solitary Man” had moved up the charts with blue smoke and mirrors. Before he was fired, Julie Rifkind performed nothing less than sleight of hand getting that record almost halfway up the charts on no sales, little airplay, and only isolated regional breakouts like Los Angeles, where the single went Top Ten. Berns greased sales by giving away records to distributors. Perhaps as many as three out of ten copies of “Solitary Man” had been giveaways. But the record did its job introducing Neil Diamond. “Cherry, Cherry” would clinch the deal.

Diamond was green. He made friends with Fred Weintraub, who ran the Greenwich Village folk club the Bitter End. Weintraub was a burly guy who did a lot of different things before opening the club in 1961, including play cocktail piano in Havana before Castro, where he
was imprisoned on gun-running charges and pardoned only because he was an American citizen. In addition to operating the club, he also managed a few folk acts.

Weintraub started working with Diamond and used Diamond as the club’s unofficial automatic opening act. He didn’t even bother giving Diamond billing until “Solitary Man” came out. Diamond was so awkward, Weintraub told him not to talk between songs. The first out-of-town dates were three-song appearances one weekend around Florida and two appearances in California on “The Beach Boys Summer Spectacular” at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles and Cow Palace in San Francisco, a panoply of pop acts with records on the radio that summer: the Leaves, the Sunrays, Sir Douglas Quintet, Percy Sledge, the Byrds, Lovin’ Spoonful, Chad & Jeremy, and others. Diamond did his one semi-hit, “Solitary Man,” and two songs he remembered from summer camp, “If I Had a Hammer” and “La Bamba.”