B005S8O7YE EBOK (10 page)

After I had answered a few preliminary questions such as “How do you know Neil and Howie?” Al invited me to sit at the piano and play some songs. Donnie was constantly in motion, alternately pacing, tapping his feet, and nodding his head slightly off rhythm. After each song, Al applauded enthusiastically, Donnie winked at me, then Donnie and Al looked conspiratorially at each other. After the fourth song, Al praised the music and the lyrics and Donnie complimented me on my “piano feel,” by which I gathered he meant my pound-out-the-rhythm-as-hard-as-I-could style of accompaniment. Al was just saying he’d like to meet Gerry when Donnie looked at his watch, stood up, and said, “Gotta run, babe.”

Moving toward the door, he added, “I gotta go meet Connie”—I assumed he meant Connie Francis—“but can ya come back tomorrow? Bring Gerry.”

“Sure, no problem.”

Donnie paused at the door long enough to say, “I like what you’re doin’. Lemme hear some more songs,” and then he was gone.

Al recapped more elegantly what Donnie had just said, then walked me out to have his secretary set up an appointment for Gerry and me for the next day.

I floated home. (Full disclosure: a Brooklyn-bound BMT train was involved.) When Gerry got home from work I told him how
it went. He was skeptical but willing to take a day off to hear what they had to say.

At the conclusion of our meeting the following day, Donnie and Al offered Gerry and me a three-year publishing contract that would give us, as a team, an advance of $1,000 the first year, $2,000 the second year, and $3,000 the third year. In exchange for $6,000, to be deducted from our future royalties, Gerry and I would assign ownership of the copyrights of all the songs we would write under the term of the agreement to Aldon Music, Inc., “and/or their heirs and assigns.” Any advances would be recouped from the writers’ share of the publishing income. The publisher’s share, equal to that of the writers, would go to Aldon and/or their heirs and assigns. At the time I had no idea what “heirs and assigns” were, but with extensions our agreement with Aldon would come to include all the songs that Gerry and I wrote separately or together from the time we signed with Aldon in 1959 until several years after the release of
Tapestry
in 1971.

We left that meeting feeling as if we had struck gold. To us, $6,000 was a huge sum of money, and that first check for $1,000 did get us out of debt. To Al and Donnie, $6,000 was a relatively small amount to invest in what was then fifty-six years of ownership and/or the right to transfer ownership of the copyright of any song written by Gerry and/or me during the term of the contract.

With our immediate financial concerns alleviated, we focused on the need to find a bigger apartment before the anticipated arrival of our baby in March. We moved to a ground floor two-bedroom apartment on Brown Street between Avenue Z and Voorhies Avenue in Brooklyn. That entire area had been cornfields when I was a child. Now it was filled with attached brick duplex houses in which a family could live on the upper two floors and cover their mortgage by renting out the ground-floor apartment.
Gerry pejoratively called the neighborhood a “people farm,” but I was thrilled to be living in four rooms instead of one.

In January 1960, I was a month shy of eighteen. The baby’s due date was approaching, and all I knew about giving birth was that it would be painful. My main source of information was my mother, who was as helpful as she could be considering that her own experience had been limited to two births for which she had been medicated. Her own mother had practiced natural childbirth, though not by choice or name, but childbirth without drugs was no more an option for me in 1960 than it had been for my mother in the 1940s.

“When I was giving birth to you,” she recalled, “the drugs they gave me made me groggy, but they didn’t stop the pain.” She hastened to add, “Don’t feel bad. You were worth it, even if you did elbow me away the first time I held you….” I rolled my eyes and then we both smiled. It wasn’t the first time I had heard that story.

Then her eyes clouded with sadness as she recounted the memory of my brother coming out purple and staying that way for what seemed to her like too long a time before he turned pink. At subsequent doctor visits, when she suspected that Richard had a hearing disability, she was told that his purple color could have been an indicator of oxygen deprivation, which she later came to believe had caused his disabilities.

My mother’s recollections were not giving me a lot of confidence. As an apprehensive seventeen year old undertaking to learn exactly how childbirth worked and how much it would hurt, I wanted my mother to tell me how painless and uncomplicated her experiences had been. At the same time, I was grateful for her counsel. Had one of my daughters become pregnant at seventeen I would have said, “You’re much too young to have a baby!” but then I would have risen to the occasion, as did my mother.

Though Gerry and I had originally planned to wait before having children, Gerry, too, rose to the occasion. When I went into labor, he helped me into the car very carefully and made sure I had everything I would need with me. Because it would be another decade before fathers were invited to participate in deliveries, Gerry was pacing and smoking in the fathers’ waiting room when our daughter Louise Lynn Goffin was born on March 23, 1960. I was allowed to hold Louise for less than a minute before a nurse took her away to clean her up, swaddle her in a pink blanket, and tuck her in a bassinet in the nursery far from her germy mother. Another nurse brought Gerry to the hallway outside the nursery so he could view his new baby through a window. When at last my nurse allowed him in to see his wife and daughter during one of Louise’s allotted visits to my room, Gerry was profoundly moved. He kept telling me how beautiful Louise was, how much he loved her, how much he loved me, and what a good father he was going to be.

Seeing Gerry’s eyes shining with such a strong commitment to love his family and keep us safe, I fell in love with him all over again.

A
s a child I had imagined, erroneously, that Tin Pan Alley was a physical alley next to the Brill Building. Both were symbols of music publishing in the twentieth century, which is probably why so many people think, erroneously, that Gerry and I wrote in the Brill Building. But we didn’t. The Brill Building was at 1619 Broadway. The building that housed Aldon Music was 1650 Broadway. With a logic peculiar to Manhattan, the entrance to 1650 Broadway was on West 51st Street. (New York Real Estate 101: why use a street address when you can charge higher rent with a Broadway address?)

At first, when we drove to Aldon from Brooklyn, we parked in the outdoor parking lot across the street. We had to find another location when the one-story lot became a twenty-two-story Sheraton hotel. (New York Real Estate 102: why maintain a business on one level when you can make so much more money renting space on twenty-two floors?)

Crossing the street we invariably passed a man whom local vendors called “Larry Sick-Sick.” Homeless and mentally ill, Larry was never far from the entrance to 1650. We never knew his last name, and someone other than he must have told us his first
name, because we never heard him utter anything but the one word he hissed repeatedly whenever anyone walked by: “Sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick!”

Another local character was Moondog, an imposing figure often seen outside the Warwick Hotel on Sixth Avenue and 54th Street. Sometimes he stood on the corner of Broadway and 51st Street. His form of mental illness compelled him to stand on a corner in the same upright position all day. He wore a blanket and big leather boots and held a long wooden staff. I never heard Moondog speak. In fact, I never saw him do anything other than stand upright with his long wooden staff through rain, snow, sleet, heat, and fine weather. Though I never saw Larry or Moondog soliciting money or food, some kindly souls must have made sure they had enough to eat. To most passersby, including young and naïve me, Moondog and Larry Sick-Sick were two among many odd citizens among the eight million residents of the Big Apple.

Aldon Music has been described as boot camp for songwriters. That it was. And yes, we did write in cubicles. The cubicles were the source of the cacophony I’d heard when I first visited the office. Each was barely big enough to contain an upright piano with a bench, a chair for the lyricist, and a small table with enough room for a legal pad, a pen, an ashtray, and a coffee cup. The proximity of each cubicle to the next added an “echo” factor. While I was playing the song on which Gerry and I were working, we heard only our song. As soon as I stopped playing we could hear the song on which the team in the next cubicle was working. Not surprisingly, with each of us trying to write the follow-up to an artist’s current hit, everyone’s song sounded similar to everyone else’s. But only one would be chosen. Inevitably the insecurity of the writers and the competitive atmosphere fostered by Donnie spurred each team on to greater effort, which resulted in better songs. It wasn’t only about writing a great song; it was about
winning
.

Though Gerry and I typically wrote together at home after dinner, sometimes he’d call in sick to his day job and we’d write in a cubicle while the secretaries fussed over Louise. Gerry, in particular, thrived on being where the action was. I didn’t realize at the time that
we
were the action. By “we,” I mean the Aldon songwriters. I don’t believe any of us knew then how much influence we would have on popular music.

Vital to that influence were the musicians and background singers who performed on our demos. One night we were listening to a playback when Gerry happened to mention that we were looking for female background singers. The engineer suggested three young black women from Brooklyn known collectively as the Cookies. Dorothy Jones, Margaret Ross, and Earl-Jean McCree had a near-perfect vocal blend. After a number of our demos became masters and then hits, the Cookies were heard around the world. Among their hits were
“Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys,”
“Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad About My Baby,”
and, most famously,
“Chains.”
Other records featuring Tony Orlando and Neil Sedaka on which the Cookies sang also became hits. Sometimes they were in the studio with Aldon writers from midmorning to the wee hours.

One night Gerry, Dorothy, Margaret, Earl-Jean, and I emerged from a demo session at 3 a.m. onto an almost deserted Broadway. Apart from a few hookers and johns, we seemed to be the only people around. While the Cookies and I waited for Gerry to get the car, we were approached by several different vehicles containing men inquiring about everything from a single to a five- or six-some. Thankfully, Gerry pulled up and whisked us all back to Brooklyn, leaving the potential johns to wonder what he had that they didn’t.

What he had was a wife and a baby daughter to support. He also had a mother-in-law who lived too far away to babysit on a moment’s notice. My participation in late-night demo sessions
was possible only when Grandma Sarah, who lived nearby, could watch Louise. My grandmother couldn’t understand how anyone could earn a living writing songs that appealed to teenagers, but that’s exactly what Gerry and I were doing. Though now in his twenties, Gerry hadn’t forgotten which three-letter word was foremost in the mind of every teen. It was s-e-x that kids thought about when they listened to lyrics about hearts full of love, hearts breaking, lovers longing, youth yearning, cars, stars, the moon, the sun, and that most innocent of all physical pastimes: dancing.

We wouldn’t write a song about dancing until the following year, but sex was definitely the implied third character in our first big hit.

D
onnie was not without idiosyncrasies. He was deathly afraid to drive, and he refused to fly. It was rare to receive his full attention except when follow-ups or chart positions were a topic of discussion. And he constantly sought reassurance.

“Sheel, babe,” he’d say to his wife, Sheila. “Look at this new carpet! Isn’t it great?”

Then he’d turn to us: “Isn’t my wife the greatest?”

And after playing a test pressing of Connie Francis’s new recording of an Aldon song: “Doesn’t Connie sound great? This is gonna be a
smash
!”

For Donnie, everything connected with him was “great.” Ironically, that’s what made Donnie great. His enthusiasm was so infectious that he got everyone within earshot all fired up about whatever he was fired up about, and what he was usually the most fired up about was convincing the artist or producer of a top 10 hit to record an Aldon song and release it as their next single, which Donnie called the “follow-up.” When Donnie said, “Come on, guys, we gotta get that follow-up!” that was an unambiguous directive to head for the cubicles.

In 1960, the hottest girl group was arguably the Shirelles, four teenage girls whose then current hit was
“Tonight’s the Night.”
Donnie wanted that follow-up. Shifting into high gear, he summoned each writer or writing team into his office and addressed that writer or team as if she, he, or they were the
only
writer or team that could deliver his desired outcome.

“Now listen,” he’d say. “The Shirelles are up. I’m gonna get the follow-up, and I want
you
to write it. Come on, babe,” he exhorted, using the term with no regard for gender. “Do it for
me
!”

And we did. He made us want to do it—for
him
.

The next day each writer or team, in turn, went into Al’s office to play Donnie the song they had written the night before. Al, who tended to leave the day-to-day business to Donnie, wasn’t usually there. With Gerry at work, I waited with the other writers in the reception area. Hearing snippets of each new song coming through the door filled us alternately with confidence and anxiety.

Gerry and I competed the most fiercely against Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Each couple came to think of the other as “the other married songwriting team,” and each couple was intimidated by how talented the other couple was. Whether in spite of that or because of it, we four have remained friends over many decades. What we shared was unique. We Aldon songwriters may have thought of ourselves as mortal enemies when it came to getting a follow-up, but we were a tightly knit brother- and sisterhood of friends, colleagues, peers, and, most of the time, allies.