A big piece of his heart

As the head of the world’s largest record company, Universal Music Group Chairman Doug Morris could spend all morning hobnobbing with the power-breakfast crowd at the Peninsula Hotel. Here comes Dave Glew now, Epic Records Group chairman and Morris’ old friend. “Dave, you’re looking great. Everything OK?”

Morris, in town from New York for the week, could be talking about his latest successes: the mounting sales of the Eminem album or the critical back flips over the new Beck CD. Both were released by Morris’ network of labels, which stretches from Interscope to Island/Def Jam and generates nearly a third of the nation’s album sales.

But the soft-spoken chief executive, casual in a dark suit with open-collar shirt and a two-day stubble, has another topic on his mind this weekday morning, and he’s so absorbed in it that he hasn’t touched his cantaloupe slices for half an hour.

Morris, 63, is talking about a new album that he calls his “baby.” It contains 10 tracks written and/or produced by the late Bert Berns, who was an inspiration when Morris was an aspiring songwriter in New York four decades ago.

“In this business, you put out records all the time by artists you love and that you hope will sell a lot, but this is probably the first time I’ve ever been involved in a record that I don’t care if it sells,” Morris says. “It’s my way of paying Bert back for all he gave me. I hope this illuminates his career, that people will understand who he was. Everybody knows his music, but they don’t know him.”

And everyone does know Berns’ music, starting with his most famous composition, “Twist and Shout.”

Was there ever a more effortless hit? From the opening line, “Shake it up baby now,” to its seductive mix of R&B; and Latin rhythms, “Twist and Shout” is an irresistible piece of rock ‘n’ roll and a staple at wedding receptions, frat parties and oldies stations.

Because the lively tune was a hit for the Beatles, most pop fans probably assume Lennon and McCartney wrote it. More sophisticated listeners who know that the song was earlier recorded by the Isley Brothers may attribute it to that group. But it was Berns (under the name Bert Russell) who co-wrote the song with Phil Medley.

That tune is one of the best-known products of a hit machine that roared triumphantly from the start of the 1960s until the charismatic New Yorker died of a heart attack at age 38 in 1967.

Van Morrison may have sung the taut “Here Comes the Night” with his group Them, but Berns wrote the song and produced the recording. Janis Joplin’s signature hit, the pleading “Piece of My Heart,” was written by Berns and Jerry Ragovoy.

Berns was also responsible for such pop or R&B; hits as the McCoys’ “Hang On Sloopy” (co-written by Wes Farrell), Freddie Scott’s “Are You Lonely for Me, Baby?,” Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me” and the Exciters’ “Tell Him.” His production credits also included such memorable hits as the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk” and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.”

The music in “The Heart and Soul of Bert Berns” is extraordinary--a virtual nomination speech calling for the late songwriter-producer’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the “nonperforming” category that already includes many of his peers, including Phil Spector, Jerry Wexler and the team of Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller.

Many of these tracks were hits in their day, but some are relatively obscure now, and they are so striking you may find yourself listening to them over and over, marveling at their construction.

The most impressive thing about the recordings is the masterful way Berns shifted emotional tones. Most of the songs are grand tales of romantic desperation featuring an instrumental tension that builds slowly with defiant horns and insistent drums, then gives way to explosive vocal release. There are lots of references to lonely rooms, tears and regret.

“Are You Lonely for Me, Baby?” opens with female voices taunting a wayward lover with the title phrase. They’re answered by Freddie Scott’s chilling surrender: “Yes, I am.”

Too little time for it all

Berns, an intense, darkly handsome man, had a wide array of influences, and he brought them all into play in his music. He studied classical music as a youngster and fell in love with Cuban music while working at clubs in Havana. That sound would color many of his recordings. In “Twist and Shout,” for instance, you can hear the chord sequence of the Cuban folk song “Guantanamera.”

Morris describes Berns as a tough street kid from the Bronx who was obsessive about his career because he suffered from rheumatic fever and didn’t feel he had long to live. In the liner notes for the album, Morris adds, “He was the most charismatic man I had ever met. Bert was just cool. Played his guitar. Bit his nails. Talked excitedly. Tight with a buck. I remember he went over to England. He was worried people would forget him while he was away. He stayed in England for, maybe, three weeks. And while he was there, he worked with Van Morrison, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.”

As you listen to Morris, it’s clear that the new CD, which was released Oct. 1, isn’t just a tribute to Berns. For those who think all top-level record executives are “suits” interested only in bottom-line profits, Morris’ devotion to Berns is a tribute to the best impulses of the music industry.

Long before he began climbing the executive ladder that led him to his current post, Morris fell under Berns’ spell. His own songwriting credits include the Chiffons’ 1966 hit “Sweet Talkin’ Guy.”

“I was this square kid from Long Island, and Bert was this hipster who was always out on the town,” Morris says with a soft smile, recalling the days in the early ‘60s when they worked for publisher Robert Mellin. “I used to love watching him in this funky old office, sitting on a couch with the springs coming out and writing songs on a guitar.

“The next day he’d bring these incredible singers into the studio and they’d hit these fabulous notes that brought the songs to life. The next thing I was hearing the songs on the radio. He was warm, genuine, encouraging and terribly driven.”

No one is more thrilled about Morris’ decision to salute Bert Berns than Berns’ children.

“I couldn’t hug him tight enough for what he has done,” says Cassandra Berns, sitting in a crowded Santa Monica bungalow that houses Sloopy II, the family publishing company. Now 35, she was 10 months old when her father died. Her brother Brett was coming up on his third birthday, while the third child, Russell, was 2 weeks old.

“To me, a lot of my father’s songs were autobiographical, about pain and love lost,” says Brett, sitting in the bungalow with his sister. “But I also think songs like ‘Piece of My Heart’ were referencing the pain in his own heart, the knowledge that he had this heart condition that was going to lead to his early demise.”

The bungalow is a virtual shrine to Berns. The walls are decorated with old album covers and award plaques. Bookcases in an adjoining room are filled with CDs, vinyl albums and 45-rpm singles of their father’s work.

Brett signs onto the Internet daily, trying to hunt down obscure singles or biographical tidbits for a book he’s writing about his father. There are also hopes for a film and a Broadway play based on Berns’ life and music.

They’ve assembled a 26-page discography that not only lists all Berns’ writing and production credits but also the versions of his songs by such artists as the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Otis Redding and David Bowie. It’s clear the children hear in the music the voice of a father they never really knew.

“He knew he was not going to live long enough to watch us grow up,” Brett says. “He told our mother that these songs would teach us who he was, and it does feel at times that he is speaking to us in these records.”

Brett and Cassandra also hope Morris’ tribute CD will rekindle enough interest in their father to spark his induction into the Hall of Fame.

To document their argument, they’ve printed a list of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members and highlighted the names of the artists who either worked with their father or recorded his songs. The list totals 18.

In speculating on why he hasn’t already been inducted, they wonder whether lingering industry scuttlebutt about Berns’ association with “unsavory characters” has played a part.

Joel Selvin, a San Francisco Chronicle pop critic and author who has toyed for years with the idea of writing a Berns biography, says he came across the underworld tales--but adds that the same could be said about scores of music industry figures at the time. He describes Berns as a “brilliant” pop mind who deserves Hall of Fame consideration.

“To me, Leiber & Stoller invented a lot of this stuff,” Selvin says. “When you look at their proteges, there was Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach and Bert Berns. He deserves to be thought of in those terms. As far as the Hall of Fame goes, I think he’s just not well enough known today. His name has just slipped off the page.”

Berns’ children also believe that their father’s name, in the absence of previous retrospective albums, has simply faded from memory, and they hope the new CD is the first step in reintroducing it.

The breakfast crowd, meanwhile, has largely vacated the Peninsula restaurant, but Morris is still talking about nuances in Berns’ music that a newcomer might not notice. He looks down at the cover of the new CD.

“Everyone thinks the record business has changed a lot,” he says. “But it’s the same as it was 40 years ago. Whether you find the music on the Internet or in a record store, the business is all about people who are able to create songs and touch people--and Bert was one of those people.”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached by e-mail at robert.hilburn@latimes.com

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Three windows to his soul

In “The Heart and Soul of Bert Berns,” Doug Morris gives us a rich survey of the darker, tortured side of Berns’ music. But the writer-producer’s sound includes lighter tunes such as the Exciters’ feel-good “Tell Him” and Them’s “Here Comes the Night,” as well as some recordings of songs that he didn’t produce. Robert Hilburn nominates three high points in the Berns legacy.

Berns’ Greatest Single Recording as a Writer and Producer: Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me” (included on “Heart and Soul”), a Top 5 R&B; single in 1962 on Atlantic Records. Berns loved explosive tension in his records, but the great thing about this enchanting tune was its restraint, a quality that makes Burke’s eventual vocal outcry all the more chilling. Berns was a master at getting great vocals out of artists, but this may be his shining hour.

Berns’ Greatest Single Recording Solely as a Producer: Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” a Top 10 single in 1967 on Berns’ Bang Records. Morrison, one of the most distinguished artists of the modern pop era, has certainly written weightier songs, but he has never felt more free or natural as a singer. And the track’s opening guitar lick is still one of the most inviting of the decade.

Greatest Version of a Berns Composition That He Didn’t Produce: Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” a Top 15 single with Big Brother & the Holding Company in 1968 on Columbia Records. Berns, who wrote this lament with Jerry Ragovoy, had an R&B; hit with it in 1967 with Aretha Franklin’s younger sister, Erma, and it was a fine record. Joplin’s version was such a wounded expression of emotional desperation that even Berns, who died in 1967, would have been stunned.