Tuesday 22 April 2014

New bio brings '60s pop giant Bert Berns out of the shadows


Joel Selvin's new book, "Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues," is an epic excavation of a key but forgotten figure in American music who died at the apex of his influence after a brief but meteoric ride.

From his first Top 10 hit, Solomon Burke's anguished 1962 breakthrough "Cry to Me," to Erma Franklin's original recording of "Piece of My Heart," released just weeks before his death in 1967 at 38, the songwriter and producer lived his life like a lit fuse.

Fuelled by the knowledge that the rheumatic fever he contracted as a child had damaged his heart to such an extent that doctors said he'd be lucky to see his mid-20s, Berns transformed his hidden torment and angst into jukebox gold by putting the right song in the hands of the right artist.

Finding his niche

A soulful, street-smart Jewish kid from the Bronx with no formal musical training, Berns was hardly a wunderkind. He spent his 20s slowly learning the ropes of the music business, and didn't find a home at Atlantic Records as a staff producer until his 30s. But once he came into his own, he parlayed his love of Cuban music and New York rhythm and blues into a trademark sound that helped reshape pop music and with hits like the Isley Brothers' ecstatic "Twist and Shout" (which Berns co-wrote), the Drifters' clave-inflected "Under the Boardwalk" and Burke's impassioned "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," a song on which Berns and Jerry Wexler cribbed co-writing credits, an all-too-common practice in those days.

When the Beatles launched the British Invasion, it was Berns who brought New York R&B to swinging London, where he produced "Baby, Please Don't Go," the first hit by the Northern Irish band Them, led by a young Van Morrison.

Emotional stamp

Berns wasn't a conspicuous auteur like Phil Spector. He didn't impose a particular sonic vision on every tune, though with Tom Dowd as Atlantic's house engineer his tracks sounded better than almost anything on the radio. Whether working with established acts or discovering new artists like Morrison and Neil Diamond, who both made their first recordings for Berns' Bang Records, he dialled the songs he produced to a heightened emotional pitch.

"Berns was writing about his life," says Selvin, former long-time pop music critic for The Chronicle and co-author of Sammy Hagar's memoir "Red." "His songs reflected some deep inner turmoil. As a songwriter he liked to push singers into desperate corners, right on the edge of hysteria. On the surface 'Cry to Me' is a love song. Solomon Burke is singing to his girlfriend, soliciting her affection, but the lyrics dwell on loneliness and emptiness. The chorus has him crying. There's so much torture in these Berns songs, often wrapped in this mambo gloss."

Not always an easy read, "Here Comes the Night" bristles with names and telegraphic descriptions of more than a hundred characters. Selvin sets the scene for Berns' rise by detailing the way rock 'n' roll and R&B disrupted the stranglehold of the major labels in the late 1950s, giving a colourful cast of hustlers the space to sign and record artists while often helping themselves to undeserved songwriting credits.

Sometimes it's even hard to keep track of Berns, who published many of his songs under the name Bert Russell and recorded under the name Russell Byrd.

Concerted campaign

Over the years there have been a few attempts at taking stock of Berns' legacy, most significantly, the British label Ace Records' two-volume anthology "Twist & Shout 1960-1964" and "Mr Success 1964-1967." Now Berns' obscurity is about to come to an end. "Here Comes the Night" is just the first salvo in a concerted campaign by Brett and Cassie Berns, who never knew their father, to raise him to his rightful place in the pop pantheon. Brett recently completed a feature-length documentary on his father, "Bang: The Bert Berns Story," and he and Cassie are producing an off-Broadway revue, "Piece of My Heart," opening this summer at the Signature Theatre.

Chatting with the siblings last week at Selvin's book release party as they shared a cigarette outside the Matrix, where a DJ had no trouble filling up an evening with classic Berns tracks, they talked about getting to know their father through his music.

"That was really the best part, learning all these songs," Cassie said.

"He knew he was going to die, and he said my children will know me through this music. As a kid, what do you get from 'Hang On Sloopy,' 'Cry to Me,' or 'Piece of My Heart'? We realized from Joel that the songs were autobiographical."

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