Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  An interesting phenomenon in Tin Pan Alley was the existence of the luftmensch, the third writer of a song. He’d come to you and say, “Hey, let’s do a song like this because I know thus and so.” So you’d do the lyric. Then he’d turn around and go to a music man and say, “I got these lyrics; you do the music.” He claims he can do words and music, but he can’t do either.

  I would come down to the Brill Building with my dirty manila envelope and my two lyrics in it wondering where I would get a piano so I could sit down and work out a song with a composer. We were always fighting to get a piano for a few hours. One time we happened to walk down the block to Radio City Music Hall on Sixth Avenue, and behind it was the NBC Building, where there were uniformed guards who kept people from going in.

  After we had been there for a while, we noticed that guys who came in with fancy briefcases and nice clothes walked right by the guards, and nobody said anything. We were so desperate for a piano, we said, “Hey, maybe we can get a place to work.” So we went home and got briefcases and we put on suits, and we marched by these guys and wandered into the halls of the NBC Building. It had terrific studios, and half of them were empty. We would sit in the studios and work by the hour. It was heaven.

  Once we got a song together, we had to get past one of the dragon ladies in the Brill Building to the inner office so we could demonstrate it. The composer would bang out the song on the piano (God help us). If the publisher liked it, the question became who would record it. They didn’t have any judgment, although sometimes they had a feel for the market.

  Goldy Goldmark was one of the more memorable publishers. He was about six feet two, and when he got excited, he’d get on top of his desk and jump up and down while he talked to you. I remember the time when one of our songs was being recorded and one of the musicians was tapping time with his foot. For some reason, Goldy Goldmark could not stand it when anybody did that. When they took a break, the musician took off his shoes. Somehow or other Goldy found a nail and a hammer, and he nailed that man’s shoe to the floor.

  Once I was sitting in one of the outer offices waiting to see this publisher with whom I had an appointment. After an hour, the dragon lady said, “Well, he had to go out.” That happened a second time and then again. The last time, I was in the outer office, and I could hear the man speaking in the inner office. When the dragon lady said, “He’s not in,” I got so angry that I pounded on the desk and said, “Give me a piece of paper.” I took a pencil off her desk, and I held it in my fist, and I wrote a big “DARION” on it and yelled, “Take that in to him!”

  She got so scared, she brought it in. I stormed out to the elevator, and the son of a bitch came running after me with the piece of paper. “What’s this?” he said.

  And I said, “You just remember that name because you’re not going to have anything to do with it.”

  “Come back in the office,” he said. I hated his guts, but I went back.

  Another publisher once told me, “Never come in my office again.”

  I said, “That’s bullshit, because if you can make two cents off me, I’ll be back in your office and you’ll have the red carpet rolled out for me.”

  The humiliations were very basic. If you’re a shoe salesman and you don’t make a sale, you can say the shoes aren’t very nice. But if you’re a creative person and they turn you down, it’s a big humiliation inside, and it happens time and time and time again.

  It was a very, very hard way to make a living. If you got a record, God help you, you got two cents: One cent went to the publisher, one cent went to the writer. If there were two writers, you got a half a penny for a record. The guy who threw the record across the counter in a store got twenty-five cents. What really saved our lives was the sheet music.

  Today there is no such thing as sheet music, but at that time everybody had a piano, and people used to stand around the piano and sing. So sheet music was important, and you could really make some money on it if the publisher was willing to give you an honest count—which none of them were. That is until we finally got tired of it and formed the Songwriters’ Protective Association for record and sheet music sales. Before we got our lawyers and accountants to examine the books, we were suddenly showered with checks.

  I got into Tin Pan Alley and the whole business of writing pop songs by kind of backing into it. I was doing special material, work for nightclub comics, vaudeville comics, little songs, jokes. It was a miserable living. If my wife, Helen, hadn’t been working, we would have starved to death. I didn’t want to go near Tin Pan Alley for two reasons: I was scared of its reputation, and for God knows what reason, I was a bit of a snob.

  One day I was sitting in my lawyer’s outer office—I’ve sat in a lot of outer offices in my day. Why he took me, I don’t know, because I sure as hell wasn’t giving him a lot. Now he came out to me and he said, “Listen, I have Red Buttons in my office, and he’s going to have a television program on prime time every week. If you could write him a song for playing him on and playing him off, you could do very well with it in ASCAP for the performance money. Talk to him.”

  So I went and I talked to Red, and considering who I was, he was very nice to me. We made a deal. It was understood that whatever I wrote, he would be on the song as one of the writers. “Show me something,” he said.

  Red has always had this little thing he does to space his laughs. He hopped on one foot, held his ear, and said, “Ha-ha, ho-ho, hoo-hoo, strange things are happening.” My partner and I took this whole thing with the hopping on one foot, and the “Ha-ha, ho-ho, hoo-hoo, strange things are happening,” and we wrote a song. Red liked it fine. He decided to use it.

  Red had his first show. It was live television, and he did the song and the whole “Ha-ha, ho-ho, boo-boo, strange things are happening.” Then, as the program was ending, he said to the audience, “Listen, I am going down to the studio to record this song. Why don’t you all come along with me, and when I say ‘ha-ha,’ you say ‘ha-ha,’ and when I say ‘ho-ho,’ you say ‘ho-ho.”

  So that’s what happened. After the program, he marched out, and the whole bloody audience marched out with him down Broadway to a recording studio, and he recorded that song. He sang “ho-ho,” and the whole audience sang “ho-ho,” and he sang “hoo-hoo,” and the whole audience sang “hoo-hoo.” And all of a sudden lightning struck. For some goddamn reason I could never figure out, the song took hold.

  But we couldn’t get a publisher because they all thought, What other artist would sing “Ha-ha, ho-ho, hoo-hoo”? And who would buy a piece of sheet music called “Ha-ha, Ho-ho, Hoo-hoo”? And that’s when the miracle happened. We made our publishing company: RB Music. We not only sold a bloody million records or whatever it was, but we got the publishers’ share and the writers’ share. Of course there were three of us counting Red, who got the lion’s share, which I was happy enough to give him. Then, and I don’t understand it to this day, we said, “Let’s do the sheet music.” What’s sheet music? It’s pieces of paper that you print on, you make a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand—it doesn’t matter. And all of a sudden that song began to sell as sheet music. I think sheet music sold at that time for fifty or seventy-five cents, but it was all profit, you kept it all. We sold three quarters of a million sheets.

  This is around the time that I began going down to the Brill Building. I was a very strange duck—a new guy who had had a smash hit! Nobody could figure out where the hell I’d come from, nor could I. I didn’t have a clue about how to write a pop song. The publishers were in a very strange position with me. The stuff I brought in and started showing them was nonsense, but they were scared to let me out. I had had a hit, and that was the magic thing. That let me live long enough to learn my business, and I did learn it in a very interesting way.

  At that time they were putting out little mimeographed pamphlets with the lyrics of the top fifty songs of the week. I brought one home, took the staples out, and laid the she
ets of paper out on the living room floor in long lines. Then I laid my lyrics down side by side with them, and I went up and down the lines trying to figure out the difference between my songs and those that were successful. And I discovered the few simple but ironclad rules of writing a pop song at that time: (1) use concrete images; (2) write plots like you see in the movies, with a beginning and a middle and an end.

  “I found the note you left for me / The wording was so cruel and plain / ‘I’m through with you,’ it said / ‘Our love is cold and dead / I’m leaving on the midnight train.’” The guy comes home; he calls for his wife; she’s not there. It’s a concrete set of images. “I rush to the station [concrete image] / Push through the crowd [image] / Fighting to reach the gate [image] / The headlight was gleaming / The whistle was screaming / ‘Too late, too late, too late’ [image].” Everything became an image. A plot, a movie plot. That was “Midnight Train,” and it was a big hit.

  One of my hit songs was “Ricochet Romance,” recorded by Theresa Brewer. Don’t ask me how my partners and I came up with it. It was one of those novelty songs, crazy songs like “Mairzy Doats”—they make no sense at all, but they have sounds that come into the ear and won’t come out.

  Crazy things happened. The phrase “Ricochet Romance” became part of the lexicon. A senator made a speech where he said something to the effect of he’s not going to have a “ricochet romance” with something or other, and it got into the Congressional Record and made the headlines. Some girl in Canada was singing in a nightclub, and a drunk kept insisting, “Sing ‘Ricochet Romance.’” She didn’t sing it so he picked up a chair and brained her with it. She landed in the hospital, and that made the headlines.

  It got to the top ten. Then it hesitated. The publisher got word from his spy in the record company (every publisher had paid spies in the record companies) that they were ready to put out Brewer’s next record. I was in the publisher’s outer office when I saw him go into the money man’s office. He was an enormous man, and he came out of the money man’s office with a roll of bills so big that his hand couldn’t get around. He shook the roll at me and said, “You see this? This is three more weeks with the Brewer record.” And he ran out. The Brewer record of “Ricochet Romance” stayed on the top ten for three weeks, and then it climbed to number one, where it stayed for months.

  The publishers had song pluggers whose job was to see that their songs got played on the radio. They’d be blared out of every candy store on loud speakers; you’d hear them as you walked down the block. Payola was the paying of the disc jockeys on the radio to play a song. It got nastier and nastier as time passed because it got involved with the “crooked noses.” It went from money to drugs and women. Everybody knew about it.

  In those days you gave your copyright to one publisher. They’d sell it to another one and before you knew it, the name of the company changed, and they bought each other’s catalogue and the result was you had no control over who had your material. This went on all the time, and it drove us crazy. But as a result of my having a publishing company with Red Buttons, I knew that if you were a songwriter and you had a hit, you had a nice year. But if you were a publisher and you had a hit, then you made real, real money. The difference between the two was not believable. And I knew in my heart that as soon as I had the muscle, no one would have my copyright.

  One week three of the top five songs on the Billboard charts were my songs: “Changing Partners,” “Ricochet Romance,” and the “Ho-Ho Song.” The result was that publishers were afraid to let me out of the office even if they hated what I brought in. Because I had these hits, I was able to make deals where I owned the copyright. Some of the composers I worked with sold their part to the publisher, but I never gave in. As a result, I own publishing rights to songs that composers I worked with don’t have, and I make three, four, five times what the composer makes.

  Once I had all these hits, the publishers were stuffing money down my throat. I couldn’t go into the Brill Building without getting dragged into a publisher’s office. And it was then that Helen and I looked at each other and said, “Yes, but where do we go from here?”

  I knew that I had more to say than I was saying in these pop songs. It wasn’t that I got tired of pop music; it was that I wanted to go beyond it if I could. I wanted to stretch myself.

  Anyway, Tin Pan Alley was finished. I could see very plainly the handwriting on the wall. You’d go into a publisher and he wouldn’t ask, “What’s the lyric about?” He wouldn’t ask, “What’s the tune?” He’d ask, “What’s the sound?” That was the death knell of what we were doing.

  When Elvis came along, when rock ’n’ roll came in, the Tin Pan Alley that I knew died. There were guys there who were so talented. They walked around like ghosts saying, “What happened? What happened?” It was so quick, overnight.

  To me, it was a question of the writing. Take one of the rock lyrics and lay it down cold on the table, and see if you can read it. People who have three-hundred-word vocabularies or less are writers. There were singers like Theresa Brewer, Patti Paige, Rosemary Clooney—they sang like angels. Today’s singers, today’s songs are not for me.

  JOEL DORN: When something is kind of defining itself like the record business was when it was still a cottage industry, there were opportunities. People who might have been furriers or dentists or clerks gravitated to this thing, got in on the ground floor. That was the music business in the fifties. In the sixties it matured. In the seventies it became a major American industry, generating billions and billions of dollars and spinning off other industries: concerts and promotions and T-shirts and endorsements. Nothing now is better or worse; it’s just not what I grew up in.

  I grew up in Yeadon, a very small town outside of Philadelphia, a Sinclair Lewis kind of town with a very conservative, prewar American sensibility. My father was in the shmatta business; he made women’s dresses and blouses. Sometimes he would take me with him when he went to New York to do business with the manufacturers in the garment center. Coming out of the tunnel into the old Penn Station was like coming into a movie. The romance, the excitement of New York was just astounding. I would see the guys in the street pushing the racks. And all the taxicabs. And all the tall buildings. It was never a question in my mind if I was going to get to New York or that I was going to be in the music business.

  I listened to pop radio, but then I started listening to the black stations at the end of the radio dial. They played swing in the forties, rhythm and blues—which was the root of rock ’n’ roll—in the late forties and early fifties, and then rock ’n’ roll and the new rhythm and blues in the mid-fifties. I was born in 1942 so I was in a phenomenal position; I caught the whole run.

  Three or four times a year, my parents would go to New York to see a show and eat at Sardi’s. They stayed at the St. Moritz and had Nesselrode pudding at the old Rumplemeyer’s. One weekend in 1956 when they went to New York and my brother and I were staying over at my grandmother’s house, I was listening to Georgie Woods, a disc jockey on one of the black stations. It was Friday night, 9:15, when he played a record called “Ain’t That Love?” by Ray Charles. And it was like the planet put its brakes on.

  I had never heard Ray Charles before. I went nuts, but I couldn’t find the record in the record stores. Then I learned Ray Charles recorded for Atlantic Records, an R&B label that had some jazz. I found an Atlantic record, and on the back it said “Supervised by Nesuhi Ertegun.” It was an odd name. I wrote to him at his office in Manhattan and told him I was having trouble locating certain records. In addition, I sent him some of my ideas for records.

  A year later, he wrote me back. That’s how I started a correspondence with this man. Nesuhi Ertegun was a great jazz record producer. He and his brother Ahmet Ertegun, the ranking elder statesman of the record business, and another guy, Jerry Wexler, were the owners of Atlantic Records. It was a phenomenal independent label. Nesuhi and Ahmet’s father had been the Turkish ambassador to the Uni
ted States during the war, and was one of those who orchestrated Ataturk’s takeover of Turkey in the thirties. The brothers were Sorbonne-educated, multilingual, and spent their teenage years in the Turkish embassy in Washington. They were also big jazz and blues fans, and in 1948, they started Atlantic Records. In the late forties, the fifties, and into the sixties, there was no other label like it. It had the best rhythm and blues, the best pop, the best jazz.

  From the time I was fourteen, I knew that I was going to produce records, whatever that meant, and that I was going to do it for Atlantic. I kept up the correspondence I had begun with Nesuhi. He wrote back to me and sent me records. I enrolled in the communications school at Temple University and got my education as best I could in Philadelphia, but always with the goal of getting to New York.

  When I was nineteen, I got a job as a disc jockey on one of the pioneer twenty-four-hour FM jazz stations in the country. I knew as a disc jockey I could establish relationships with the record companies and the artists who came to town and played the jazz clubs in Philly, and I could begin to get some kind of a national reputation. In those years, a good disc jockey would “break records”—that is, pick a cut on an album and play it. If it sold, they’d say, “Well, Joel Dorn broke it in Philly.”

  Nesuhi let me come to his sessions. I saw him record Herbie Mann, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Betty Carter, people like that. I remember the first time I walked into the studio at 11 West 60th Street. It was like going to the movies for the first time. It’s dark. The board has all the dials: red, cobalt, amber, little baby pin-spots. And the sound—I never heard sound like that in my life. I had had no sense at all of what happens at a recording session. I never knew they sometimes cut the music first and put the singer on later, that things were put on separate tracks, that stuff was added.

  Today you can learn record production and engineering at all the major music schools. Then you learned it like you learn a trade. I was lucky; I apprenticed to Nesuhi Ertegun, this gentleman record producer with exquisite taste. I was like a de facto producer-in-training. I started making records for Atlantic on an independent basis in the mid-1960s while I was still a disc jockey in Philadelphia, coming into Manhattan whenever I could. Then one day in May 1967, I got a call from Nesuhi. “Come to New York.” He offered me the job I had been begging for for years.