Read Online Here Comes the Night by Joel Selvin - Free Book Online
Authors: Joel Selvin
Tags: music, History & Criticism
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damage had been done.
The next Tuesday, Goldner called the disc jockey to tell him he had made “Gee” a smash. Within weeks, “Gee” sold more than fifty thousand records in Los Angeles alone and was rapidly spreading across the country. By January, Goldner had not only sold a lot of records, but also landed high on the pop charts, rarified air for rhythm and blues records. Using a patchwork network of independent distributors, tirelessly working the phones himself with disc jockeys and record retailers, Goldner proved it possible for a New York independent label to have a nationwide hit.
However, he was also losing so much at the racetrack, he sold the publishing on his hit song to Meridian Music for what the trades described as “a lot of money.” Meridian Music was one of a number of publishing companies owned by Morris Levy.
For the rest of his life, Morris Levy would loom as an ominous figure over the Broadway music trade, a lifelong handmaiden to mobsters, a bully to anyone who did business with him, and the black-bag man behind the scenes of the record business. The FBI always figured Levy as the front man for the syndicate in the record business, and that was not without a certain basis in fact. At the same time, Levy was not a scary, threatening figure—he knew those people—but a wisecracking, avuncular yiddishe macher . He kept his finger in every part of the music business. He owned nightclubs. He promoted tours. He loaned money to musicians. He had music publishing.
Levy loved copyrights. They don’t talk back, he liked to say. When he first started his publishing company, he commissioned blind pianist George Shearing to write “Lullaby of Birdland,” named after the nightclub at Fifty-Second Street and Broadway that Levy operated, and the damn thing went on to become a standard, recorded a few hundred times.
Although he was only twenty-eight years old in 1955, Levy already had a colorful past. His father and a brother died when he was young, and after his other brother, Irving, joined the Navy, he grew up poor, living alone with his mother in the Bronx, running around the neighborhood since they were children with Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, fingered as the triggerman in the botched hit of mob boss Frank Costello in 1957. He dropped out of school in the sixth grade after assaulting a teacher. At age fourteen, working as a hatcheck boy at the Greenwich Village Inn, he came to know Thomas Eboli—called Tommy Ryan—an up-and-coming soldier in the Genovese family. At age sixteen, he went to work as a darkroom boy in the Ubangi Club, which was run by those guys. He wound up working his nightclub photography racket in a number of their clubs.
In 1945, after a year in the Navy, Morris, his brother Irving, disc jockey Symphony Sid, and nightclub impresario Monte Kay took over a fried chicken restaurant on Broadway and turned it into a jazz club. When they started booking bebop players such as Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon on Monday nights, lines snaked out the front door. The Royal Roost was a big success, but Levy got screwed by his partners and the club sold out from under him.
In December 1949, Levy and Kay bought Birdland—named after Charlie Parker, known to all as Bird—from mobster Joseph (Joe the Wop) Cataldo and turned the Fifty-Second Street basement into the headquarters of New York jazz—Dizzy, Bird, Miles, Monk, and all that. The full Count Basie Orchestra used to play three or four two-week stands every year, the sign outside the club reading simply BASIE’S BACK.
There was an unholy alliance between Morris Levy and George Goldner. A sharp guy who knew all the angles, Levy wasn’t a record man. He could wheel and deal, con and connive, but George Goldner had the magic touch. He could scrape a bunch of kids off the street, throw them in the studio with a raggedy-ass band, and come out with gold. What Levy had was money, which Goldner always badly needed, hardly surprising
The next Tuesday, Goldner called the disc jockey to tell him he had made “Gee” a smash. Within weeks, “Gee” sold more than fifty thousand records in Los Angeles alone and was rapidly spreading across the country. By January, Goldner had not only sold a lot of records, but also landed high on the pop charts, rarified air for rhythm and blues records. Using a patchwork network of independent distributors, tirelessly working the phones himself with disc jockeys and record retailers, Goldner proved it possible for a New York independent label to have a nationwide hit.
However, he was also losing so much at the racetrack, he sold the publishing on his hit song to Meridian Music for what the trades described as “a lot of money.” Meridian Music was one of a number of publishing companies owned by Morris Levy.
For the rest of his life, Morris Levy would loom as an ominous figure over the Broadway music trade, a lifelong handmaiden to mobsters, a bully to anyone who did business with him, and the black-bag man behind the scenes of the record business. The FBI always figured Levy as the front man for the syndicate in the record business, and that was not without a certain basis in fact. At the same time, Levy was not a scary, threatening figure—he knew those people—but a wisecracking, avuncular yiddishe macher . He kept his finger in every part of the music business. He owned nightclubs. He promoted tours. He loaned money to musicians. He had music publishing.
Levy loved copyrights. They don’t talk back, he liked to say. When he first started his publishing company, he commissioned blind pianist George Shearing to write “Lullaby of Birdland,” named after the nightclub at Fifty-Second Street and Broadway that Levy operated, and the damn thing went on to become a standard, recorded a few hundred times.
Although he was only twenty-eight years old in 1955, Levy already had a colorful past. His father and a brother died when he was young, and after his other brother, Irving, joined the Navy, he grew up poor, living alone with his mother in the Bronx, running around the neighborhood since they were children with Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, fingered as the triggerman in the botched hit of mob boss Frank Costello in 1957. He dropped out of school in the sixth grade after assaulting a teacher. At age fourteen, working as a hatcheck boy at the Greenwich Village Inn, he came to know Thomas Eboli—called Tommy Ryan—an up-and-coming soldier in the Genovese family. At age sixteen, he went to work as a darkroom boy in the Ubangi Club, which was run by those guys. He wound up working his nightclub photography racket in a number of their clubs.
In 1945, after a year in the Navy, Morris, his brother Irving, disc jockey Symphony Sid, and nightclub impresario Monte Kay took over a fried chicken restaurant on Broadway and turned it into a jazz club. When they started booking bebop players such as Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon on Monday nights, lines snaked out the front door. The Royal Roost was a big success, but Levy got screwed by his partners and the club sold out from under him.
In December 1949, Levy and Kay bought Birdland—named after Charlie Parker, known to all as Bird—from mobster Joseph (Joe the Wop) Cataldo and turned the Fifty-Second Street basement into the headquarters of New York jazz—Dizzy, Bird, Miles, Monk, and all that. The full Count Basie Orchestra used to play three or four two-week stands every year, the sign outside the club reading simply BASIE’S BACK.
There was an unholy alliance between Morris Levy and George Goldner. A sharp guy who knew all the angles, Levy wasn’t a record man. He could wheel and deal, con and connive, but George Goldner had the magic touch. He could scrape a bunch of kids off the street, throw them in the studio with a raggedy-ass band, and come out with gold. What Levy had was money, which Goldner always badly needed, hardly surprising
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