Salon.Com
October 2002
Berns,
a legendary New York record man, was 38 when he died in
1967. Collections honoring such a figure usually come in
boxes; ignoring Berns' pop hits with Van Morrison and the
McCoys, this is a single disc of nine deep-soul numbers
that Berns wrote and produced, plus one misguided homage.
Some of the tracks here were big -- Solomon Burke's "Everybody
Needs Somebody to Love" and "Cry to Me,"
Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters' "Cry Baby,"
Irma Franklin's "Piece of My Heart," the Isley
Brothers' "Twist and Shout." Some -- the obscure
Hoagy Lands' heart-stopping "Baby, Come On Home,"
Freddie Scott's "Are You Lonely for Me, Baby"
and the Drifters' "I Don't Want to Go On Without You"
-- might never have existed at all. But together these records
make a picture so delicate you can almost hear the performers'
fear that anything they do will break it. You hear strange,
astonishingly delicate bits of instrumentation -- guitar
triplets, a hesitating piano, room to breathe all through
the arrangements -- that produce the feeling that the great
voices Berns recorded were not quite of this earth.
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Salon.Com
October, 2002
