Here Comes the Night by Joel Selvin Read Free Book Online Page A

way, sensing someone who needed to express himself. Ahmet warmed up Charles at rehearsal the night before, enthusiastically singing with Charles, accompanying him on a song Ertegun had written called “Mess Around.”
    “Hold your baby tight as you can,” Ertegun half sang, half shouted, “spread yourself like a fan and do the mess around.”
    While his new partner Jerry Wexler watched goggle-eyed from the other side of the glass, Ahmet leaned over the piano and walked Charles through the wiseacre blues, “It Should Have Been Me.” Charles sprayed little bursts of Bud Powell bop and Jimmy Yancey boogie-woogie between takes. On the tape of the evening, he sounds like nothing so much as someone searching for his voice. The next day’s session yielded his first chart hit for Atlantic, “It Should Have Been Me,” the talking blues Ahmet had deftly demonstrated.
    A month after the Ray Charles session, Ahmet was in the studio with a new group called Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters. He went to Birdland to see Billy Ward and the Dominoes, an oddball booking. Ahmet thought the world of Clyde McPhatter, the lead tenor of the Dominoes, best known for the raunchy 1951 hit “Sixty Minute Man,” although McPhatter sang lead on the group’s 1951 debut, “Do Something for Me.” Ahmet felt McPhatter’s voice had a magical, almost angelic quality. Ward was a tough cookie who ran a tight shipand levied harsh fines for perceived infractions. Ahmet immediately noticed that McPhatter was missing from the lineup at Birdland, went backstage at intermission, and learned that Ward fired McPhatter five days before. He rushed to a phone booth, looked in the book, and found several McPhatters listed. On his first call, he reached Clyde’s father, who handed the phone to his son. McPhatter came to the Atlantic offices the next day and they cut a deal.
    After the June 1953 session didn’t yield any satisfying masters, McPhatter put together a second group of Drifters around a pair of brothers, Gerhart and Andrew “Bubba” Thrasher, whom he knew from singing in church. Jesse Stone rehearsed the group extensively and wrote a new song, “Money Honey,” that would launch the group’s historic career after they returned to the studio in August.
    Atlantic never expected to sell records to whites. They made records for blacks and sometimes even tailored pop material for the rhythm and blues market. Wexler, in fact, was looking for an r&b group to cover the latest Patti Page record, “Cross Over the Bridge,” when he stumbled across the label’s first great pop hit.
    He took a Bronx vocal group that called themselves the Chords into the studio in March 1954. For the afterthought B-side, the group offered a swinging, almost jazzy, largely indecipherable piece of inspired lunacy called “Sh-Boom.” The B-side caught fire on the West Coast. The label stripped the Patti Page cover off the single—thinking to save it for later—rereleased the single, and quickly dumped off half the publishing for $6,000 to Hill & Range. The Chords version on the new Atlantic subsidiary label, Cat Records, hit the pop charts in June 1954. A week later, the cover version from the Canadian vocal group called the Crew Cuts charted. Although the Chords version made extraordinary inroads for an independent r&b record on the pop charts, winding up nicking the bottom of the Top Ten, the smooth, gleaming white version went all the way to number one and Atlantic, unfortunately, had kept only half the publishing. Best six grand Hill & Range spent all year.
    While Atlantic was beginning to see some benefit from a subterranean shift in popular tastes as the market began to expand for rhythm and blues records, the company did not derive income from the sales of cover records. Neither did the artists. When r&b chart veteran LaVern Baker finally managed to land a record on the pop charts with “Tweedlee Dee” in January 1955, the plain white cover version by Georgia