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Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
Fri Aug 29, 2014, 05:13 PM Aug 2014

Excerpt for Afro-Cuban fans: Human Needs, Dirty Deeds

Weekend Edition August 29-31, 2014
Making Music, Making History, Making Money

Human Needs, Dirty Deeds

by LEE BALLINGER

~snip~
Rock & roll then was not just a new thing but an art form that sometimes still bore the imprint of the big bands and orchestras which had preceded it. Berns embraced this in the music he shepherded to wax and so helped to usher in the first era of symphonic R&B, which ultimately helped to define the music of Isaac Hayes (using the Memphis Symphony as part of his palette), Gamble and Huff with Philadelphia International, and Johnny Pate with Curtis Mayfield. Berns was also in the middle of the epochal shift of gospel into the secular realm, bringing sanctified sounds onto the hit parade with the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” and “Twist and Shout.”

He was the first American producer to work in a British studio and British invasion groups such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Animals, and Yardbirds cut his songs. The one track Led Zeppelin didn’t release from the sessions for their first album was a cover of Berns’ “Baby Come on Home.”

At a time when the U.S. government was enforcing an embargo of Cuba, Berns was undermining it with his use of Cuban rhythms and song forms. Selvin writes about Berns’ work with preacher/R&B star Solomon Burke: “’Tonight My Heart She is Crying’ floats on a gentle Afro-Cuban danzon with xylophone, flute, and a bed of tinkling percussion.” Berns made an albumherecomes with groundbreaking Cuban bandleader Arsenio Rodriguez while “Twist and Shout” had “the Cuban guajiro rhythm….It was Afro-Cuban rock and roll. The mystery of the mambo lurked at the heart of this record.”

Berns worked closely with such great Brill Building songwriting teams as Leiber and Stoller, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. He collaborated with fellow musical pioneers such as Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records. In 1964, the year that the Beatles began their conquest of America, Berns put 19 singles on the pop charts, a big slice of the 51 he racked up in his seven year career.

“Berns wasn’t the greatest of the era, although his best work was as good as anybody’s,” writes Selvin. “But his unique voice as a songwriter, producer, and record man is so deeply ingrained in the vocabulary of pop music it has become common parlance….[His] songs have been covered, quoted, cannibalized, used as salvage parts, and recycled so many times, his touch has just dissolved into the literature.”

Author/musician Ned Sublette adds: “Bert Berns is to me the great rock and roll producer, the one who best combined the Afro-Cuban groove with the gospel shout.”

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/29/human-needs-dirty-deeds/

[center]

Solomon Burke and Bert Berns (woman in the not identified)[/center]
Rock Against Racism

“When they say ‘we want our America back,’ what the fuck do they mean?” So goes the chorus of a Jill Sobule song. Many rock-and-roll fans have long believed that America’s true soul is very different from the narrow America of the Tea Party’s imagination. Instead, they believe in what Bruce Springsteen once called “the country we carry in our hearts,” a place where personal freedom exists in harmony with egalitarian inclusiveness—a place that is best glimpsed through some of America’s music.

Over the decades the rock-and-roll business grew to encompass all sorts of dark and misogynistic pretenders (and even a few right-wingers such as Ted Nugent), but rock romanticists see the rock culture of the 1950s and ‘60s as both a reinvention of American popular music and a force for self-expression and liberal culture. This idea is richly explored in two new books: Joel Selvin’s Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues and Robert Hilburn’s Johnny Cash: The Life.

Selvin’s downbeat title is somewhat deceptive because his book is really an exhaustively researched love letter to an era of R&B and rock and roll in the early 1960s that created pop classics and directly inspired the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and subsequent decades of rock-and-roll musicians. Rock and roll’s influence over western values included a celebration of all forms of sexuality and an embrace of marginal figures, which in turn broadened cultural definitions of success and glamour. But during its early decades, there was no more important subtext to rock culture than its frontal assault on American racism.

Selvin notes that 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education, was “the same year that rock and roll emerged as a force. Rock and roll was the desegregation of the Hit Parade.” 1954 was indeed the year of Elvis Presley’s first single “That’s All Right (Mama)” and Bill Haley and the Comets’ transformative “Rock Around the Clock,” but the first African-American rock-and-roll musicians who also pulled in white listeners actually emerged the following year, in 1955, when Chuck Berry and Little Richard had their first pop hits.

More:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/rock-against-racism

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