New York

Mary Harron on the RBP podcast

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In this episode we welcomed the wonderful Mary Harron, director of cult movies I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho. After a brief digression on dating Tony Blair at Oxford, the Canadian relived her memories of the punk rock scene at New York’s CBGB club, including her interviews with the Ramones and Talking Heads for John Holmstrom & Legs McNeil’s pioneering Punk magazine. Mary also talked about her friendship with ZE’s Michael Zilkha and her long fascination with Warhol and the Factory. Along with her hosts, she heard clips from Martin Aston’s 1987 audio interview with Tom Verlaine, prompting her recall of his seminal band Television and a general discussion of 1977’s classic Marquee Moon album.

Mark & Barney paid heartfelt tribute to tragic blues-guitar hero Peter Green, ruminating on what made the Fleetwood Mac man so much more emotional a player then his UK blues-boom peers. They also said goodbye to the hilarious CP Lee, former frontman with Mancunian satirists Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias. After bringing Mary’s directorial career up to date – with an aside on the American Psycho soundtrack that afforded Jasper a chance to wax lyrical about Huey Lewis & the News – Mark selected his library highlights, including notable pieces about Brian Jones, Labelle, the Bush Tetras and, erm, the Knack. Jasper rounded things up – and brings matters back down to earth – with remarks on pieces about “superstar DJs” and Stock Aitken Waterman teaboy Rick Astley…

The RBP Podcast

In last week’s episode of the Rock’s Backpages podcast, we welcomed special guest James Fox, author of 1982’s bestselling White Mischief and the man who, 10 years ago, made Keith Richards’ Life one of rock’s outstanding autobiographies. James talked us through his long and distinguished career as a journalist in Africa, and as a features writer during the golden era of The Sunday Times Magazine. He described how his friendship with “Keef” was cemented by the pieces he wrote for that publication about the Rolling Stones in 1973 and 1976, answering his hosts’ questions about the great man’s rhythm guitar playing.

The fantastic Mr. Fox also offered his perspective on Little Richard, whose death last week prompted discussion of the gay black southerner’s explosive role in the birth of rock & roll. We heard a clip of the sometime Mr. Penniman speaking in 1985 – as well as one of the late Betty (‘Clean Up Woman’) Wright owning up to being a shameless show-off in 1978. James was on hand, too, to reminisce about the importance of Moe Asch’s legendary Folkways label – as revisited in the week’s new audio interview, a conversation with folk elder Pete Seeger conducted by Tony Scherman in 1987. Clips followed of Seeger talking about Asch and recalling Folkways legends Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie…

It was a hoot.

The great David Toop on the RBP podcast

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IN THIS WEEK’S episode of the Rock’s Backpages podcast, Mark Pringle & I invite writer and fearless musical improviser David Toop to reminisce about his work and his long and fascinating career. David’s new anthology Inflamed Invisible has just been published by Goldsmith’s Press.
Toop talks about the impact of an aunt returning from New York with a stack of rhythm & blues 78s – and how this instilled a lifelong love of African-American music. After he describes his early adventures in free and improvised music, his hosts ask how a man who’s collaborated with Brian Eno and Max Eastley came to profile Bros for The Face – by way of his pioneering 1984 book The Rap Attack, the first serious study of the East Coast hip hop scene. The three men then discuss the cult “disco auteur” Arthur Russell, whom Toop interviewed.
Toop pitches in on the subject of the week’s free feature, cult dubstep star Will “Burial” Bevan, with Barney waxing ecstatic about the man’s noughties albums and subsequent Hyperdub tracks – and Toop making slightly more sceptical noises.
Mark intros the week’s new audio interview, with the late Joe Smith, and we hear a clip of the veteran West Coast executive discussing Joni Mitchell, one of the many artists he worked with at Warner Brothers and Elektra/Asylum. After considering Smith’s role in the rise of acts like the Grateful Dead, Toop confesses to a surprising penchant for Crosby, Stills & Nash, prompting a more general discussion of dismantling musical hierarchies.
Finally, Mark talks us through his highlights among the week’s new library articles, including pieces on the Four Tops (1966), Mott the Hoople, with David Bowie on backing vocals (1972) and the late Luther Vandross (1985) – another artist Toop interviewed for The Face.

Danny Fields in the RBP podcast

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In this week’s RBP Podcast, Mark Pringle and Barney Hoskyns are joined by the legendary Danny Fields to hear tales of his Elektra days with the Stooges and the MC5 – and the five years he spent managing the Ramones. He also recounts the tale of the night Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin wound up rolling around on the floor of Steve Paul’s The Scene in a ball of cartoon smoke and fists.
The week’s free feature focuses on Primal Scream: Mark, Barney and Danny compare notes on the band’s frontman Bobby Gillespie and weigh up the influence of 1991’s Screamadelica. The trio then listen to excerpts from a 1978 audio interview with George Clinton, in which the P-Funk chief talks about the meaning of “funkadelic” and how the classic ‘One Nation Under a Groove’ was born.
To round out the episode, Mark presents highlights from the articles added to the archive, including a 1966 interview with Kim Fowley, a review of Shirley Bassey live at the Royal Albert Hall and a 1983 report on MTV.

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Knotted into consternation,

weight of words and burdens

and injunctions to do better.

On a dime a song

floods into me and washes,

softens knots and nodes

and liquifies rigidity of

what I think I am,

splays me forlorn and

floating down this river:

Wider than the sea,

the sound of Hepburn

and her huckleberry friend

and me.

Was Bert Berns the Greatest White Producer of Black Soul?

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YESTERDAY I WAS lucky enough to see the UK premiere of Bang!, Brett Berns’ exceptional doc about his dad, who co-wrote and/or produced at least a dozen of the greatest R&B/soul records to come out of New York City in the ’60s: ‘Cry to Me’, ‘Cry Baby’, ‘Piece of My Heart’, ‘I’ll Take Good Care of You’, ‘Are You Lonely For Me, Baby’, ‘Twist and Shout’, ‘It’s All Over’, ‘I Don’t Want to Go On Without You’, ‘It Was Easier to Hurt Her’, ‘Tell Him’, ‘A Little Bit of Soap’ and ‘Down in the Valley’.

(That’s without even mentioning his considerable success with such white “pop” artists as the McCoys, the Strangeloves, and of course Them/Van Morrison and Neil Diamond.)

Bang! is a thrilling, moving and at moments very funny film about a remarkable character, a Jewish hustler who loved African-American singers, Cuban dance rhythms, and Italian mobsters in equal measure. In a Q&A after the Doc’n’Roll screening in London, Brett Berns said “the sands of time” had covered over his father’s achievements, and that he’d set out years ago with the principal aim of getting Bert into the Rock & Roll of Fame. That finally happened this year, a testament to Brett’s perseverance and belief, but it’s been an arduous process. I recall meeting Joel Selvin in New York in 1998 when was he was doing preliminary research for his ace Berns biog Here Comes the Night, a primary source for Bang!, with excerpts narrated by Steve Van Zandt.

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Thank god Brett had the presence of mind to start interviewing acquaintances and colleagues of his father’s long before he was able to garner any interest in the project: Bang! really feels like a labour of love and devotion, boasting irresistible interviews with Bert’s take-no-shit widow Ilene (Brett’s mom); with an enthroned Solomon Burke and with Betty Harris and Brenda Reid (of the Exciters); with surprisingly endearing mobster Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia (who brought the great Freddie Scott to Berns); with his greatest writing partner Jerry Ragovoy; and with a host of the hilarious music-biz Jews who adored Berns (though not with Jerry Wexler, the G – as in Gerald – of Bert’s Bang! label, and someone who doesn’t emerge from the film too well despite being Brett’s godfather).

Doubtless as a result of project’s slow-building momentum, Brett was eventually able to interview Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and Van Morrison – all of whom were touched directly or indirectly by Bert – but predictably they don’t provide much more than cliché in conversation (and Van doesn’t mention the fact that Wassel once smashed an acoustic guitar over his head in New York’s King Edward Hotel… or perhaps Brett had to edit it out).

The only gaping omission in this fine film is any vivid impression of Berns himself, given the regrettable absence of interview footage with the man. But there is a wonderful piece of session audio in which Bert coaches the magnificent Betty Harris through the opening line of ‘It’s Dark Outside’ – and it tells you all need to know about this deeply soulful cat and the big heart that gave out on him on a bitterly cold day at the end of December 1967.

See Bang!, read Here Comes the Night, and plunge back into those gloriously overpowering soul ballads.

Oh, and here’s a MOJO piece I wrote on Berns back in March 1998…

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Bert Berns: The Soul Man with a Huckster’s Heart

HE WAS, said Jerry Wexler (above right), “a paunchy, nervous cat with a shock of unruly black hair”. He looked like a vaguely disreputable cross between Gene Vincent and Denholm Elliott. He liked the company of gangsters, and he boasted that he’d run guns and dope in the Havana of the 1950s.

But Bert Russell Berns was also a master of symphonic soul, of the uptown New York sound that combined cascading orchestration with drenching gospel vocals. He made the kind of records Bacharach and David might have cut had they ventured down to Stax, or Pomus and Shuman down to Muscle Shoals: stupendous soul singles like Betty Harris’ ‘Cry To Me’, Solomon Burke’s ‘Goodbye, Baby (Baby Goodbye)’, Ben E. King’s ‘It’s All Over’, and Freddie Scott’s ‘Are You Lonely For Me’. In partnership with Jerry Ragovoy, Berns wrote and produced orgasmic soul ballads by Garnet Mimms and Erma Franklin, whose scorching ‘Piece Of My Heart’ has been covered by everyone from Big Brother & the Holding Company (1967) to Shaggy (1997).

“He was a great writer, a great man,” said Solomon Burke. “‘Cry To Me’ [1961]… was really soul music. It wasn’t like pop at that time, it wasn’t country, it wasn’t like R&B. The only way it could be classified was soul music. That’s when it all started.” High praise from a man who, according to Jerry Wexler, actively disliked the cocky, street-smart Berns.

Berns had learned his smarts in the Bronx, where he was born to Russian immigrant shopkeepers on 8 November 1929. He studied classical piano as a child, and possibly even attended the famous Juilliard music school. Employment during the ’50s came in a variety of forms: work as a salesman, as a music copyist, and finally as a session pianist. Smitten with salsa, he headed south to Cuba and soaked up the quajira rhythms of Havana – rhythms that would come to serve him well in the early ’60s. (Jerry Wexler remarked that Berns made a virtual cottage industry out of the chord changes to ‘Guantanamera’.)

Returning to New York at the end of the ’50s, Berns took a job as a songplugger with Robert Mellin Music, just down the road from the Brill Building on Broadway. Under the pseudonyms Bert Russell and Russell Byrd, he wrote songs – and even recorded them – for labels like Laurie and Wand. With Phil Medley he wrote ‘Twist And Shout’, a song massacred by Jerry Wexler and Phil Spector when they produced a sorry version for Atlantic vocal group the Top Notes, but then revived by Berns himself when he produced the 1962 version by the Isley Brothers. Other early hits included the Jarmels’ ‘Little Bit Of Soap’ and The Exciters’ ‘Tell Him’.

Work for Atlantic began in late 1960. “He just came off the street one day and started demonstrating songs to me,” recalled Jerry Wexler. “He had so many ideas and licks that I said, ‘We’re gonna produce some records together’.” Taking over the Drifters from the departing Leiber and Stoller, Berns produced ‘At The Club’, ‘Saturday Night At The Movies’, and the group’s last great single, ‘Under The Boardwalk’ (1964), with its sombre Berns-Wexler-composed B-side ‘I Don’t Want To Go On Without You’. For Solomon Burke he produced ‘Cry To Me’, ‘The Price’, and ‘If You Need Me’, and co-wrote ‘Down In The Valley’ and ‘Everybody Needs Somebody To Love’ (a song Burke described as “our gospel march”). Wexler even put new signing Wilson Pickett with Berns for one single, the gloriously misjudged but ‘Come Home, Baby’. “Bert had Pickett crooning, something like Ben E. King, and it was a flop,” Wex said.

In 1963, fate had brought Berns together with Philly-based writer-producer Jerry Ragovoy, and he wound up splitting the royalties on the sublime lamentation that was Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters’ ‘Cry Baby’ – backing vocals courtesy of Cissy Houston and the Warwick sisters. “Bert was a meat-and-potatoes four-chord basic kinda guy with a street feel that other people would have killed for,” Ragovoy told Al Kooper. “I think his talent far exceeded mine, but he couldn’t really hear past four chords, and comparatively I was sophisticated. So I would come up with a fifth chord and he’d give me that look and say, ‘What is that, bebop?'” After several more Mimms beauties – ‘It Was Easier To Hurt Her’, ‘I’ll Take Good Care Of You’ – Ragovoy took the uptown soul sound to a delirious extreme with Lorraine Ellison’s volcanic ‘Stay With Me’ (1966).

Booming drums, mournful horns, gospel keyboards, wailing female vocals: these were just some of the ingredients Berns utilised to produce such sobbingly cathartic sides as ‘Cry Baby’, ‘Cry To Me’, and Ben E. King’s 1964 masterpiece ‘It’s All Over’. There’s a lot of raw despair in these records, but it’s a despair held in check by the craft of the arrangements. “I never met anyone who understood pop so well,” wrote Nik Cohn in Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom. “He was an identikit American record man, canny and tough and flash, always money-conscious… he wasn’t a beautiful person but he was intelligent, articulate and he made some good lines.”

Cohn met Berns in “a decaying West Hampstead caff” in mid-1965, on one of the trips Berns made to London to produce Them and Lulu for Decca. Ironically, given the group’s cover of Twist And Shout, Berns could see that the Beatles were sounding the death-knell for Brill Building pop. “These boys have genius,” he told Cohn. “They may be the ruin of us all.” This may be partly what had sparked his interest in Them, and especially in the band’s truculent frontman Van Morrison. “Bert was a very creative, dynamic guy,” Phil Coulter, right-hand-man to Them’s manager Phil Solomon, told Johnny Rogan. “He beat the band into shape. It had always seemed like Van Morrison and a bunch of geezers. But without diluting their rawness, Bert gave them a lot of cohesion.”

The cohesion even extended to the hiring of “Little” Jimmy Page on lead guitar for the session that produced ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’ b/w ‘Gloria’. Them had an even bigger hit with Berns’ own ‘Here Comes The Night’, which reached No.2 in March 1965 and even cracked the American Top Thirty. Indeed, Berns believed in Morrison’s talent enough to send him a one-way ticket to New York after Them had split up, and to sign him to the Bang! label he had formed in partnership with Jerry Wexler and Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun.

Taking his place on a roster that included the McCoys and Neil Diamond, Morrison soon found that Berns was giving him less than his undivided attention. Apart from the enduringly charming ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’, which made the American Top Ten in August 1967, the tracks cut in New York with Berns – including the epic ‘T.B. Sheets’ and early, Dylanesque versions of Astral Weeks‘ ‘Madame George’ and ‘Beside You’ – left Van deeply unhappy. For all of Berns’ desire to break the mold, his business style was still pure Broadway hucksterism – and utterly inappropriate for Morrison, who recorded a series of songs with nonsensical lyrics to fulfil his Bang contract. (A propos the business style, Jerry Wexler claims that things “started to get funny” with Berns in 1967, and that there “signs that he was running with wise guys”. When Berns sued Atlantic for breach of contract, Wexler and the Ertegun brothers “said goodbye to Bang”.)

The story goes that Berns brought ‘Piece Of My Heart’ to Morrison and asked him to help him finish the song. When Van declined, Berns took the song instead to his old partner Jerry Ragovoy, who came up with the immortal “Didn’t I make you feel like you were the only man” opening line and completed most of the verses to go with Berns’ lacerating chorus. Recorded by Aretha Franklin’s sister Erma, it became the twenty-first single on the Shout label that Berns had formed in 1966 as a soul counterpart to Bang – and which had already released one bona fide classic in Freddie Scott’s funky ‘Are You Lonely For Me’. (When Keith Richards was asked to pick his desert island Top Ten in 1986, he chose both ‘Are You Lonely For Me’ and ‘Piece Of My Heart’.)

‘Piece Of My Heart’ was Berns’ last great soul production, but not the end of his influence on pop music. Janis Joplin, for starters, would go on to record ‘Cry Baby’, as well as two further Jerry Ragovoy songs, and the Blues Brothers would turn ‘Everybody Needs Somebody To Love’ into their very own sanctified anthem. Occasionally someone else draws on the deep well that was Berns’ musical spirit and offer up a slice of deep orchestral soul in a spirit of homage to the man Solomon Burke – mistaking the man’s heritage – called a “paddy motherfucker”. When Maria McKee and Sam Brown collaborated on a track for McKee’s 1993 album You Gotta Sin To Get Saved, they came up with the ecstatic ‘I Forgive You’, a magnificent tribute to the man who keeled over from a heart attack in a Manhattan hotel room on 30 December, 1967.

“Berns was a soul savant, a backroom white soul brother,” writes his son Brett in the liner-note to a double-CD package of Berns classics serviced to the industry this summer by the Sloopy II Music company that administers his publishing. Jerry Wexler, who did not attend his funeral, said that Berns was “eclectic, a tireless go-getter and hitmaker”. Few unsung heroes of ’60s soul are more deserving of a place in the pantheon.

The Best of Bert

The Isley Brothers: Twist And Shout (Wand, 1962)

Betty Harris: Cry To Me (Jubilee, 1963)

Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters: Cry Baby (United Artists, 1963)

Solomon Burke: Goodbye Baby (Baby, Goodbye) (Atlantic, 1964)

Ben E King: It’s All Over (Atco, 1964)

Them: Here Comes The Night (Decca, 1965)

Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters: I’ll Take Good Care Of You (United Artists, 1966)

Freddie Scott: Are You Lonely For Me (Shout, 1966)

Van Morrison: Brown-Eyed Girl (Bang, 1967)

Erma Franklin: Piece Of My Heart (Shout, 1967)

Fa-fa-fa-fashion: Vogue @ 100

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LAST WEEKEND, owing to a funeral in my wife’s family, I had to forego the chance to rub designer shoulder pads with Anna Wintour and Victoria Beckham at one of the innumerable events lined up to celebrate the 100th birthday of Vogue.

I’d been invited because I once regularly contributed to the fashion “Bible” and had, in fact, been asked to offer up some recollections of my Vogue years for the handsome Voice of a Century coffee-table book published last week by Genesis Publications.

Among the things I wrote was this: “Vogue took me out of the blokeish world of music journalism and injected me into a milieu with which I had – and still have – a very ambivalent relationship. I liked its intense glamour but was always slightly scared and suspicious of it.” And in the end, that was why I felt relieved to send editor-in-chief Alex Shulman my apologies and say I was unable to attend.

That old ambivalence was born almost certainly of the fact that my parents scorned fashion as vain and superficial, but also from a profound lack of confidence in my own sartorial style. Yet to deny I felt any pull towards Vogue’s world would be disingenuous. The fact is, I was pathetically flattered to appear in its pages, as if somehow it hoisted me out of the grubby geekdom of music journalism and propelled me into some jet-set domain in which, in my heart, I knew I did not belong.

My peak Vogue moment came in the summer of 1992 when features editor Eve MacSweeney asked me to fly to New York to interview Naomi Campbell, who predictably kept me waiting in a hotel room for 24 hours. I look back now and wonder if I shouldn’t have ingratiated myself still deeper into that monde, rather than revert to blokeish type and take the staff job offered to me by fledgling music monthly MOJO.

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With my wife, who does possess innate sartorial style, I watched both parts of the Beeb’s recent Absolute Fashion doc on Vogue and found myself feeling the same old ambivalence: how seductively luxurious it seems, how beautiful the women are… yet how absurd the preening paranoid vanity of it all… and how grotesque it all is in a world where the most traumatic suffering occurs every moment of every day.

Though I thought Alex Shulman and Lucinda Chambers came across as very grounded and unpretentious in the film – just as they did when I went in for monthly editorial meetings all those years ago – it didn’t change my fundamentally puritanical distaste for the elitism that Vogue represents and defines. I was glad that Patsy and Edina were on hand in Ab Fashion to puncture its manifest foolishness.

And so, in the end, did I regret not being at swanky private club 5 Hertford Street last Sunday to mingle with Posh Spice and Poppy Delevigne? Not really. I’d only have stood around feeling wholly out of place – knowing I don’t belong. I almost certainly had a better time in Blackpool, celebrating the life of my wife’s beloved and brilliantly funny Auntie Elma, than I’d ever have had in Mayfair.

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Laing’s Lonely City

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After seeing Olivia Laing speak impressively at July’s Port Eliot festival, I read her brave and remarkable book about a subject that’s almost taboo in our culture: loneliness.

The Lonely City is a study of alienation and estrangement – but also of art, AIDS, attachment and social media – and I recommend it highly. Laing writes of her own bewildered isolation in Manhattan, takes in the work of Warhol, Hopper and others, and says such interesting things about the terrors of aloneness vs. the joys of solitude. Like most of us I’ve experienced intense loneliness in my life – but also a kind of ecstatic solitude. The Lonely City made me think deeply about all of this.

Laing writes beautifully and with piercing honesty. “What’s so shameful about wanting,” she asks. “Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two?” She’s also brilliant on Facebook, Twitter et al: “I wanted to look and I wanted to be seen, and somehow it was easier to do both via the mediating screen.”

The Lonely City