Free Here Comes the Night by Joel Selvin Page B

Clark to the subcommittee. He tried to explain himself (“I’m a traveling man and a recording man. I spend fourteen or fifteen hours rehearsing, recording, and traveling quite a bit . . . ”). He described in detail how he transferred title to Clark’s publishing companies to four copyrights (including the 1958 Top Twenty-Five hit “Could This Be Magic” by the Dubs) through Vera Hode, a former Morris Levy employee who was still working in Goldner’s 1650 Broadway office when she went to work for Clark.
    Mr. Lishman: “What benefit would you get out of this?”
    Mr. Goldner: “Hoping that he would play my records.”
    Mr. Lishman: “And the only profit you would make would be on the sale of records?”
    Mr. Goldner: “Yes, sir; that would be my profit.”
    Mr. Lishman: “You wouldn’t receive anything at all, either from mechanical royalties—”
    Mr. Goldner: “Not anything from the publishing end of the tunes.”
    Mr. Lishman: “Nothing.”
    Mr. Goldner: “Nothing.”
    Mr. Lishman: “The only profit you could expect would be from the sale of the records.”
    Mr. Goldner: “Yes, sir.”
    Mr. Lishman: “Did Dick Clark play all these songs on his show, the American Bandstand and the Dick Clark Show ?”
    Mr. Goldner: “I think three of the four were played; I don’t think ‘Beside My Love’ was played.”
    Mr. Lishman: “And what happened to the three that were played? Did they—”
    Mr. Goldner: “‘Could This Be Magic’ was a chart record; ‘Every Night I Pray’ was a chart record; ‘So Much’ was a chart record, too; three records hit the top 100 charts.”
    Mr. Lishman: “Did they hit the top before Dick Clark started plugging them?”
    Mr. Goldner: “I don’t think so.”

    * Saxophonist Wright began his career in the late thirties playing around Harlem clubs in a trio with another young musician just starting out, pianist Thelonious Monk.

Berns at the piano

 
     
    IV.
    1650 Broadway [1959]
    I RVING BERLIN WOULD often find himself trapped in the elevator with these horrid young rock and rollers. He would scowl and look away as he went to his seventh-floor office. The sleazy songswipers of his own age were bad enough, but these hotshots, barely older than the teenagers who bought their songs, had found entirely new ways to be uncouth.
    The twelve-story building at 1650 Broadway on the corner of West Fifty-First Street housed plenty of music business offices. A few were even distinguished tenants, like Berlin, the man who wrote “There’s No Business like Show Business,” “White Christmas,” and “God Bless America.” “St. Louis Blues” composer W.C. Handy also kept his office in the building. But, for the most part, 1650 was rock and roll.
    There was nothing especially noteworthy about the building at a glance. A drugstore held down the corner on Broadway. The office building entrance was around the corner on Fifty-First Street, large chrome numerals “1650” above a revolving door. But nothing less than a tumultuous revolution was going on inside. From within these walls, insurgents were mounting an assault on the New York music business, an elite, time-honored industry established before the turn of the century.
    In the four years since rock and roll first struck a chord in the national breast, this awful scourge had shown no signs whatsoever of crawling back into whatever gutter it came from in the first place. The haggard, jaundiced music business professionals had seen passing fancies come and go time and again over the years, but this earsore just kept coming, like some untoward swarm of insects sweeping out of the cracks in the sidewalk. To these old hands, rock and roll sounded like musical illiteracy, the undignified, untutored keenings of woebegone Negroes, hicks, and juvenile delinquents.
    The major labels had lost control of the hit parade. In four years, the big labels—Columbia, RCA Victor, Decca—had gone from having four-fifths of the Top Ten hits to