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Though he has few equals as songwriter, producer and record executive, few know the name, much less the dramatic life story of Bert Berns.  He wrote “Twist and Shout,” “Piece Of My Heart,” “Hang On Sloopy,” “I Want Candy,” “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love,” “Cry To Me,” “Cry Baby,” “Here Comes The Night,” “Tell Him” and hundreds of other songs.  He produced “Under The Boardwalk,” “Baby Please Don’t Go,” “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Baby I’m Yours” and dozens of other standards.  He championed the likes of Van Morrison, Neil Diamond, The Isley Brothers, Ben E. King, Solomon Burke, The Drifters, Barbara Lewis, Jimmy Page – the list goes on and on.  And all this in a few short years between 1960 and 1967, when he died of a heart attack at the young age of thirty-eight.  Yet despite his enormous impact, Bert Berns has been almost completely forgotten.  No induction into The Songwriters Hall of Fame.  No induction into The Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. 

“Bert Berns is one of the great untold stories of rock & roll,” wrote Ben Fong-Torres in Rolling Stone.  “One of the most gifted, charismatic and successful record producers of the 1960s, on a par with Phil Spector or the Holland/Dozier and Leiber/Stoller teams,” writes Ace Records chronicler Mick Patrick.  “One of the great originals of the golden age of rhythm and blues,” writes Berns historian Joel Selvin.  “An extravagantly talented songwriter and producer who brought Latin rhythms into soul music and soul to rock and roll,” writes Blogcritics.  “The white king of soul music” is how Al Kooper described him.  “An eclectic, tireless go-getter and hitmaker” said Jerry Wexler.  “An identikit American record man, canny and tough and flash” wrote Nik Cohn.  “A master of symphonic soul, of the uptown New York sound that combined cascading orchestration with drenching gospel vocals,” said Barney Hoskyns in Mojo magazine.  “A clear-eyed music visionary who created some of the most honest and powerful music of his generation – the lost pioneer of Sixties rock and soul,” wrote Doug Morris.  Unique and extraordinary in style, character, sound, and legacy, Bert Berns elicited such superlative expressions of admiration and respect as would normally be reserved for the household names of pop culture.  Yet he has been virtually disappeared.

Thus begs the question.  Why?  For the story of Bert Berns is one that is both inspirational and tragic, beautiful and shocking.  And it is a narrative that threatens to rewrite the histories of many carefully manicured reputations.

Bert Berns’ story begins in the Bronx during the Great Depression.  Born on November 8, 1929 to Jewish immigrants, Bert was struck with rheumatic fever as a child – an illness that almost killed him and which would have a dramatic effect on the rest of his now shortened life.  Coupled with a witness to the struggles of his people in Europe and Palestine, the tough street kid resolved to live life with courage and urgency, immersing himself into a passion for music.  Although his parents tried to steer him toward classical piano, Bert fell in love with the grooves of his Black and Latino neighbors – channeling the deep soul of gospel and the blues, and the Latin rhythms of the Cuban quajira.

At night, Bert would climb to the rooftop of his parents’ Bronx apartment, guitar in hand.  He would look south to the big city lights of Manhattan, dreaming of Broadway.  Young Bert fashioned himself a singer, and would demonstrate his chops behind
the piano in the Catskills.  In his twenties, Bert danced the Mambo in Harlem and identified with the Beat Generation.  He met a girl, fell in love and moved to The Village. When she left him, a heartbroken Bert and his friend Mickey pooled their meager resources and bought a nightclub in the ultimate destination of the time – Havana, Cuba.

Upon arrival, the two hustlers learned that their ‘nightclub’ was actually a whorehouse.  But the room had potential.  So Bert prowled the streets, searching back alleys for his beloved quajira, and transformed the brothel into an underground music scene.  Moving fluidly among glitterati and musicians, rebels and gangsters, Bert was in his element. (He would famously boast of running guns for Castro’s revolutionaries.)  But with the guerrillas making their way toward control of Havana, Bert fled the island and returned to the city of his birth. 

 

Thus marks the beginning of Bert Berns’ great seven-year run.  With nothing but a beat-up guitar and a briefcase full of songs, Berns began working his way into the corridors of the Brill Building establishment, pounding the Broadway pavement in search of his destiny.  Hustling poor and hungry, Bert strikes an extraordinary friendship with a legendary figure twice his size in the name of Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia – a jolly, ferocious, Robin Hood-like wrecking-crew of an Italian from East Harlem who was booking horses on Broadway before Bert showed him the music business.  The two would become inseparable friends.  And from the days of breaking into frank-and-beans dispensers of The Automat to the days of breaking heads of anyone who crossed their paths with hearts of malice, Wassel would make certain that “nobody gonna’ mess with this guy.”

“The hardest working man on Broadway” is how the old boys at Colony Records remember him.  He would go into the Brill Building, take the elevator to the top floor, and work his way down the stairs, playing his songs for the old Tin Pan Alley types who were more interested in the next Irving Berlin than the sounds coming from the new breed of writers such as Berns.  Stonewalled from the outset, Bert found a small publisher across the street from the Brill Building at 1650 Broadway who was willing to take a chance on him.  Robert Mellin signed Berns, agreeing to pay him fifty-dollars a week to write and plug songs.  Bert Berns was thirty years old, and was finally given his first break.

Not yet content with giving up his dreams of becoming a performing artist, Bert began recording his songs under the pseudonym of Russell Byrd. He even appeared on Dick Clark’s Bandstand before deciding to concentrate solely on writing and producing for others. When he had his first hit record with The Jarmels in 1961 performing “A Little Bit Of Soap,” followed by The Exciters’ number one smash “Tell Him,” the offers began pouring in from labels all over town. Before he knew it, Bert was sitting in on a Phil Spector session at Atlantic Records with his latest offering, “Twist and Shout,” which was hacked to pieces by Spector and the never-to-be-heard-from-again Topnotes. Sweating profusely, biting his nails, Berns interjected, “You’re fucking up my song!” Atlantic chief Jerry Wexler invited Bert to shut up, and the rest is history. Berns took his production to an Isley Brothers session, and the record became one of his first signature masterpieces. Wexler wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, and immediately booked Bert for the upcoming Solomon Burke sessions.

Bert had instant success with Solomon, writing and producing the classics “Cry To Me” and “Down In The Valley.”  Soon thereafter, two events occurred that would make Berns indispensable to Wexler and Atlantic’s founder Ahmet Ertegun – the dismissal of their longtime in-house producers Leiber and Stoller, and the ascension of a band from Liverpool that was setting the world on fire with a little help from “Twist and Shout.”  So Bert Berns in 1963 became the staff producer at Atlantic Records, where he would write and produce for everyone – The Drifters (“Under The Boardwalk,”), Solomon Burke (“Everybody Needs Somebody To Love,”), Ben E. King (“That’s When It Hurts,”), Little Esther Phillips (“Hello Walls”), Barbara Lewis (“Baby I’m Yours,”), Lavern Baker, Patti LaBelle, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett.