Willi burke biography

He would put me at ease with his stories, fielding phone calls with child-like disbelief at the outside world. Some cracker trash country singer called at 3 am wondering if Doc knew how to lure his cat down from the roof. There were more fakers and poseurs in the music biz than anywhere, and Doc was blessed with knowing all the assholes.

Johnny, the current driver of Doc's bus, was Fats Domino's former road manager, who cut his teeth collecting Domino's nightly box office receipts. When Johnny went home, Doc would buzz in guests through the electronic lock on his 11th floor door. When in town, Big Joe Turner would drop in, feeble with a cane, yet still able to shout blues all night long, and every song in the key of C.

Doc was often on the phone to the committably insane Phil Spector, who gave no other man but Doc full respect. A happenstance visit by Ronnie Spector to Doc's apartment resulted in a breakneck romance that sucked every minute of my life for four months. Then one night, Ronnie, in a hurricane of alcoholic fury after her Roy Radin Vaudeville Tour, threw me out of her apartment along with the maid who I learned was her mother.

Ronnie was Godzilla disguised as Gidget. Doc helped me regain my sanity in the year it took to recover. John - a. Mac Rebennack - became Doc's new collaborator. A small songwriting keyboard was always present in Doc's living room. King and Joe Cocker. The two doctors Doc and Dr. John wrote concept albums, with songs that rolled like honey off the tongues of B.

During songwriting sessions, Mac would retire to the bathroom for a half hour. Each time, Doc sweated out whether he'd emerge alive or have to be carted out by ambulance. Mac later credited Doc for inspiring him to give up an old habit. According to Mac, one of the five purest traditional blues motifs was single-handedly created by Doc in the song "Lonely Avenue", recorded by Ray Charles in Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum I imagine they're shuffling along to it or something.

All the junkies, Mac told me, thought I was a junkie. They said somebody who wasn't could never have written 'Lonely Avenue. During a serendipitous night going through Doc's forgotten closet, I found the original reel-to-reel. These I transferred on my Teac to fresh tape. In a master songwriting class he gave from his apartment, I sat as an observer.

A lot of Doc's philosophy was black and white: "I look at music one way. It's either soulful If it's internal it's great, if it's external it's not great. I can tell where a songwriter has sat with a line for two weeks. To me, any artist who sits there analyzing the lines should be a mathematician instead. Then Doc would point out the weaknesses and strong points.

Guests like Dr. Doc explained to the class why they shouldn't think in a shallow hit-song mentality. How he derived more satisfaction from a soulful rendition of an original song on a Jimmy Witherspoon record that sold 10, copies than a hit he wrote for, say, Andy Williams who refused to sing Doc's "Can't Get Used To Losing You" on his TV show until it reached Number 1.

How they should immerse themselves in a regional genre of music, say New Orleans, before attempting to write honestly in that form - not just do a cynical quick study. How to listen to a singer's entire output before tailoring a song specifically for him, learning what he can sing. In the '50s, the managers of an untalented heartthrob named Fabian approached Doc and his partner, Mort Shuman.

That's very difficult to do. Fabian's first two hits, "Turn Me Loose", and "I'm a Man", originally written for Elvis, were watered down melodically and lyrically for the limited chops of Fabian. The career of Jerome Felder - a. Doc Pomus - might be divided into three periods. The first was as a blues singer. In , at age 19, his debut 78 record was released on the Apollo label.

A middle-class Jewish kid from Brooklyn, he changed his name to "Doc" so his dad, a ghetto lawyer, and his mom, a proper English woman, wouldn't know he was headlining at Negro joints.

Willi burke biography

He handpicked rookie musicians King Curtis and Mickey Baker for his live backup band. He recorded some 30 sides for Apollo, Chess and Savoy. In this era, Doc Pomus was likely the only white blues singer in America. He always had a record out, and in those days a blues single that sold 20, copies was a huge hit. But unlike his dark-skinned contemporaries, he couldn't work the South, where a white man was forbidden on the chitlin circuit.

In what he once referred to as Crow Jim-ism, he was restricted to the colored joints of the Northeast, mainly a dozen establishments in Brooklyn, Harlem and Jersey. Until he was 32 he never earned more than two grand a year, lived in flea bag hotels, and feared he'd wind up on the streets. Somewhere around the time of his last and greatest single, "Heartlessly", he had an alleged affair with actress Veronica Lake.

Alan Freed broke the song into heavy rotation on New York airwaves in This was a strong indicator it was destined to chart. As was common practice when a small label release made this impact, a major label - in this case RCA - bought the master. And then for reasons forever unknown, RCA killed the record, never released it. Perhaps because Doc was on crutches, unmarketable as a matinee idol?

The experience so soured him he quit singing forever. Surely had Elvis released the rockin' ballad "Heartlessly" identical to Doc's single, it would be a standard today. If you wrote half a song and needed an ending, anybody who was around would come in and help, and you would do the same for them. Whenever a record was produced, we'd all be there in the rehearsals.

And now it's all Big Secret business. When I talk with contemporary artists, they're more involved with the mechanics of business than they are with the craft. They asked his permission to change it around, giving him a third interest, which Doc thought was fair. Returning from his honeymoon in early , he and his wife stopped at a diner, a few dollars left to their name.

Doc noticed a new song, "Youngblood" by The Coasters, on the jukebox and threw in his nickel. From a penthouse cubbyhole in the Brill Building, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman set out to reap teen coin, crafting hundreds of bluesy pop gems. Twelve songs a week they wrote, overpowering the odds of reaching the charts by sheer abundance.

Doc wrote 80 of the lyrics, 20 percent of the melody. None of them paid any attention to me and if they asked what kind of songs I wrote I felt embarrassed. If I had written a fifth-rate Broadway song, my God, they would have been proud. A childhood victim of polio, Doc was on crutches, never able to walk. One night he was at a dance with his wife, waiting for her to finish dancing with a bevy of partners, patient and cool on the sidelines.

Though he never said so, it likely provided the inspiration for these lines: "Don't forget who's taking you home And in whose arms you're gonna be So, darling, save the last dance for me" This much covered Drifters hit, with the Cubano-Ricano rhythms of the early '60s, has passed the lips of several generations - none hip to the hidden meaning. After , one of pop's great songwriting teams disbanded when Mort jumped ship.

By sheer coincidence, Doc's wife walked out the same week. In crutches since polio took use of his legs during early childhood, a fall down a flight of stairs put him in a wheelchair, where he would thereafter remain. Throughout the Beatles and Woodstock years, Doc Pomus stopped writing songs. Pomus's reply was to claim he was a singer.

A jazz trumpeter Frankie Newton overheard the commotion and invited Felder to sit in. Seizing the opportunity, Felder got up on the stage and began singing Piney Brown Blues. Intrigued, Newton and others invited him back. A British jazz critic and songwriter Leonard Feather heard him there and recorded him. Feather provide the songs and played piano on his first record released on Apollo label.

Now a nineteen-year-old political science student at Brooklyn College, Felder was nicknamed Doc for his learning and added the Pomus himself. Pomus would drop by and sing a song while accompanying himself on the piano. If a producer or singer liked it, the song recorded and became the property of Atlantic's Progressive Music. By the mids Pomus had begun recording blues based songs for a variety of labels with little success.

Songs like Lonely Avenue won Pomus some fame but little money. His singing career was even less rewarding. In October, , he wrote and recorded Heartlessly for Dawn Records. However Dawn little so many small, undercapitalized independents sold it to a major label, RCA, where it promptly and his singing career died. Time seemed to be passing Pomus by in more ways than one.

In desperation he turned to a teenager, Mort Shuman that was dating his cousin Neysha. Until he entered public school, he spoke Yiddish in Brighton Beach's "shtel on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean," as his neighborhood was described in an unpublished autobiographical sketch. He lived in the same apartment block as Neil Sedaka and both of them learnt classical piano at the Juillard School of Music.

At 15 Mort went to the New York City College to study philosophy but after a year he was expelled for spending too much time playing piano in bars. Shuman's Brooklyn house was on the same block a Neil Sedaka 's. Shuman was still a teenager when he met Pomus, his father died and discovered marijuana. Further reading [ edit ]. References [ edit ].

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Retrieved June 30, Retrieved November 29, Archived from the original on March 3, Retrieved June 1, Retrieved February 7, The Phoenix. Archived from the original on September 26, Retrieved April 24, Paste Magazine. New York Times. October 24, Retrieved November 30, Financial Times. American Antiquarian Society.

Retrieved February 29, The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved June 27, Archived from the original on April 24, Retrieved June 23, ISBN Retrieved February 4, Retrieved May 21, External links [ edit ]. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — Class of Bobby Bland Booker T.