Here Comes the Night by Joel Selvin Read Free Book Online

cognoscenti and he aspired to their level of cool.
    Wexler came to work in 1953 at the Atlantic offices at 234 Fifty-Sixth Street, above Patsy’s restaurant. It had been a speakeasy during Prohibition called the 23456 Club, and the creaky, excruciatingly slow elevator belonged to that bygone era. Most visitors preferred the rickety wooden staircase. Atlantic occupied the top floor. A stockroom took up the back. In front was one big room with several desks and a grand piano. Wexler and Ahmet sat side by side, although Wexler arrived early in the morning and Ertegun never showed up before noon, sometimes not until hours after that.
    When they held recording sessions, they stacked one desk on top of the other and pushed them to the side of the room and rolled the chairs into the stairwell. Tom Dowd, whom the company hired exclusively to make their recordings, made some modest improvements on the recording equipment. The floor sagged and creaked. There was a skylight in the middle of the sloped ceiling. The company sometimes still rented time at outside recording studios, but mainly this was where Atlantic operated at the time Big Joe Turner came into the makeshift studio for a historic February 1953 session to record “Shake, Rattle, and Roll.”
    Atlantic had made a record the previous year with Turner in New Orleans, but the principals weren’t even on the scene—they just sent Turner into the studio with a bunch of local New Orleans players (who included pianist Fats Domino) and he came back with “Crawdad Hole” and “Honey Hush.” Ertegun and Wexler did meet up with him in Chicago in October 1952 and recorded “TV Mama” with Chicago guitarist Elmore James, and they cut “Midnight Cannonball” with him in December in New York.
    Jesse Stone wrote “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” under his pen name Charles Calhoun. They pushed the desks to the walls and brought the camp chairs out. Ahmet, Wexler, and Stone barked the background vocals. Pianist Harry Van Walls rippled little boogie-woogie triplets under the song’s rhythm and Turner croaked Jesse Stone’s vivid eroticism: “You wear those dresses the sun comes shinin’ through / I can’t believe my eyes all that mess belongs to you.”
    “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” was one of those mythical convergences of personalities, history, and music, frozen in time through the majesty and mystery of magnetic tape recording. It is an entirely unself-conscious record that does not recognize or acknowledge the rapidly changing audience for the music; it is the epitome of the classic unfettered rhythm and blues record, a great, roaring blast of lust and boogie-woogie that echoes through the years. When Bill Haley and His Comets recorded “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” the following year, the lyrics were cleaned up, the arrangements pepped up, and the foreboding, ominous mood of the original dissipated, but the song’s irresistible beat remained. The Haley record cracked the pop Top Ten, sold more than a million copies, and was one of the key records in the emergence of rock and roll.
    At some point, Herb and Miriam Abramson had given Ahmet a copy of the 1951 record “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand,” on a small West Coast label called Swing Time by an artist named Ray Charles. Ahmet couldn’t stop playing it. Sixteen-year-old Ray CharlesRobinson, who went blind as a child shortly after watching his brother drown, left blind school in 1946 in Florida an orphan and took a bus to Seattle because that was as far away as he could get from Florida. He gigged around the Seattle area, polishing his Charles Brown imitation, and was working as piano player and musical director for bluesman Lowell Fulson when Atlantic bought his Swing Time contract for $2,500 in 1952.
    At the first Atlantic session with Ray Charles in New York, the strong-willed pianist tangled with arranger Jesse Stone over musical ideas, but when he returned for a second date in May 1953, Stone stayed out of Charles’s