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Join us for a special sneak peek of Bang! The Bert Berns Story, which tells the story of 1960s American songwriter and record producer Bert Berns. The documentary is narrated by Steven Van Zandt and includes interviews with Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Van Morrison, Ben E. King, Ron Isley, and Cissy Houston. 2016. 96 min. USA. Not Rated.

“One of the great untold stories of Rock n’ Roll.” – Rolling Stone

Following the film, legendary soul singer Betty Harris (“Cry to Me”and “His Kiss”) will perform with the Mighty Soul Drivers.

A post-film Q&A will feature Bert Berns’ son, Brett Berns, who co-directed the film with Bob Sarles; Bert Berns’ daughter, Cassie Berns; producer Leo Feroleto; recording artist Kenny Hamber; and Betty Harris.

The event is planned in collaboration with Queen Ann Nzinga Center and the Six Summit Gallery.

[thewadsworth.org]

WHEN: December 17, 2016 @ 6:00 pm
COST: $20/$18 members

Checked him out a few years ago...........very special guy........

[www.youtube.com]





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I wonder if Van will re-record Ringworm as a tribute ?

Andrew Loog Oldham is also one of the talking heads, very effective. Interesting film; the book is excellent.

[m.youtube.com]

Movie trailer.

Thanks for this link; I'm enjoying it. I think Christiano mentioned this would be coming up in a thread late last year.
This is one fascinating guy. Historic. For all kinds of genius in those Bang Sessions variously; bringing that spanish and latino percussive lilt to a lot of Van's earliest solo work; some of whichis untourchably great..."spanish rose' a lot of those 'brown eyed girl' session stuff has ab sustained me during times of my life. "Blowin' Your Mind" and various things it has been repackaged on....'the smile you smile' 'he ain't give you none' is just astounding to me. just astounding peak music from Van...ro ro rosey ain't bad neither....

...and the comic tragedy of Van later writing songs like "ringworm," or the classic "Wanna Danish..." whatever out of tune derisive shit he could off the cuff come up with, as 'lyrics'- - and present them as finished tracks to get out of his contract....
"have a seat...have a sandwich...have a danish..." out of tune about 63 seconds long....lol classics in themselves...
but there's "the back room" and other absolute stunners also on his Bang catalog; and Bern's genuis bled into the mix in a big way...a huge natural step for Van who would erupt into more and more greatness; basially setting the scene for Astral Weeks during this time...'his madame george' from those sessions and etc...are justfiably historic imo.

and a million other artists, stories thrills and chills; i'm def interested in this project, ty.
brief bio by Joel Selvin; who is really very good write imo.
[www.rockhall.com]

New biography explores unknown hitmaker, history of R&B
[www.youtube.com]

2016 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Steven Van Zandt inducts Bert Berns -- Complete Speech
[www.youtube.com]

Thank you for this thread.

Great stuff Hopkins - you couldn't cut and paste this stuff. You're fast! Should be a good viewing.

Yep! very interested. I think it's because I spent so much time with those earliest solo records. All I had known about Van was I liked those two Them records. This Bang era stuff made me a lifetime fan; as we know now, he would really really take off from him here. there is so much i have no clue about concerning Berns, a lot of artists and sessions that I want to hear about; the whole drama of his heart condition, kinda like Bobby Darin in a way, knowing he was running on very borrowed time and all that...wow...
i could easily have pasted that Selvin bio piece, I don't know if it opens up in other countries....it's not their usual p.r. crap it's a bit above that with Selvin adding things up and sorting them out a bit....i can paste if anyone wants...I'm just glad you brought it up, and to see the clip you linked...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-04-17 23:51 by hopkins.

Thanks for posting - just read the Selvin piece, what an amazing life Berns had.

Kingmanbartow thank you for the thread and information and clip. !
I hope u don't mind if i paste the follwing piece as I enjoyed it.
It's a pay news site w a couple of free passes each month and sometimes things don't open for me;
I don't know how it would be overseas...so I'll take a minute and paste it too, if that makes it easier for fans here to cruise through it.

Also pretty 'Stones related' in some heart-warming ways; Solomns Burke has performed with The Rolling Stones, his begging, pleading demanding version of Cry To Me was def on their radar....
...they scooped it up for their own inspired version, which if memory serves me well drove the girls crazy; I mean screaming screeching bonkers...
...it was masterful and powerful. and just as full of soul in a way; they took it on and owned it...never a diss on Burke's AMAZING original produced by Berns.
that one is a dead serious stunner imo.
....and Keith seems energized and filled with respect and admiration for the guy in your lead link; promoting the docu; I def want to see it....
...Keith seems very informed and aware of what this guy has done....Hall of Fame got this one right.
This below from NYTimes.....,________________________________________________________________
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KingmanMany-Hit Wonder, Out of Obscurity
Bert Berns, Songwriter and Producer, Remembered
By LARRY ROHTERJULY 16, 2014
[static01.nyt.com]
Even in his mid-1960s heyday, Bert Berns was barely known beyond the obsessives who studied songwriters’ and producers’ credits on 45 r.p.m. records and LP album jackets. And then, after his death in 1967 at the age of 38, something truly odd happened: Though the songs he wrote and produced, like “Twist and Shout” and “Hang On Sloopy,” proved to have durability, growing in stature and popularity as the years passed, Berns’s own reputation receded even further into obscurity.

But now, Bert Berns is having a moment. A new biography, Joel Selvin’s “Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm & Blues,” praises him as “one of the great originals of the golden age of rhythm and blues,” an argument repeated in a documentary film about his life that is in the works, tentatively called “Bang! The Bert Berns Story.” And on Monday, a new musical named for another of his well-known songs, “Piece of My Heart,” opens Off Broadway at the Pershing Square Signature Center.

“He wasn’t the best,” Mr. Selvin said in an interview this month. “But his best was as good as anybody’s best.”

Certainly the story of Berns’s life, short though it was, lends itself to the same sense of drama often expressed in his songs. Born into a Jewish family in the Bronx that hoped he might become a classical pianist, he instead developed a love of Latin music that took him to Cuba, where he claimed to have run guns for Fidel Castro’s rebels. A late starter in the music business, he had a hand in more than 50 hits in seven years, consorted with gangsters and succumbed to heart disease just as the careers of his last three protégés, Neil Diamond, Van Morrison and a studio guitarist named Jimmy Page, were getting underway.


“I had no idea who he was” before being invited to write the book for “Piece of My Heart,” the playwright Daniel Goldfarb said. But now, “I feel like Bert Berns was an artist who had a lot stacked against him and had to fight his way through it.” He added: “Even though his music is so diverse, the songs are autobiographical. That’s why he’s a great artist: He has a voice and knew how to tap into it.”

At the time Berns was active, hyphenated songwriting teams, usually with the responsibility for lyrics and music clearly divided, dominated a scene centered on the Brill Building: Bacharach-David, Barry-Greenwich, Goffin-King, Leiber-Stoller, Mann-Weil. Berns was different. He either wrote alone (“Here Comes the Night,” “Tell Him,” “Cry to Me”) or with a revolving cast of collaborators that included Jerry Ragovoy, Phil Medley, Wes Farrell, Jerry Wexler and the soul singer Solomon Burke.

The tone of Berns’s compositions, many of which he wrote on a battered acoustic guitar, was atypical, too. Burt Bacharach and Hal David created a cosmopolitan sound with complex harmonies, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller offered acute social observations with a humorous streak. But Berns’s trademark was the dark, angst-ridden tale of love unrequited or gone wrong, often with the words “cry” or “heart” in the title: Within months of Berns’s death, Janis Joplin had hits with both “Piece of My Heart” and “Cry Baby.”

“Bert was really a purist, after a pure sound that was soulful, had simplicity and was rhythmically solid,” said Garry Sherman, Berns’s favorite orchestrator and arranger, who has come out of retirement to work as the music supervisor on the play. “The one thing he demanded was that every artist tell a story,” and as a result “he was able to get performances that were meaningful, not just a melody and words.”

One explanation endorsed by all three of the new works, reductionist though it may seem, is that Berns took a gloomy view of life because he knew he didn’t have long to live — or as Mr. Selvin put it, “you can hear the pathology in the music.” As a boy, Berns had rheumatic fever, which led to heart disease and doctors’ warnings that he was likely to die before he reached 30.

In the studio, “he used to tell me, ‘I don’t want to jump around too much, my heart you know, I want to stay in the seat,’ ” said Brooks Arthur, a recording engineer who often worked with Berns and went on to become a Grammy-winning producer. “The writing was on the wall, but he powered through it. He’d talk about it in jazz terms: ‘I don’t know how much song there is left in me.’ ”

The Berns revival is occurring at a moment when jukebox musicals like “Beautiful,” “Jersey Boys,” “Motown,” “A Night With Janis Joplin” and “Million Dollar Quartet” have encountered success on and off Broadway. In addition, a raft of documentary films about overlooked pop music figures have been released in recent years, including the last two Oscar winners in the documentary category, “Sugarman,” about the Detroit singer Rodriguez, and “20 Feet from Stardom,” about backup singers.

So there is an understandable temptation to view the Berns musical and documentary as somewhat late entrants in what is becoming an increasingly crowded field. But Berns’s son Brett, who is involved with both projects, took pains to note that the musical has been in the works for at least seven years, and that its origins go back even further, to the 1990s, when the Berns family recaptured control of the copyrights to the songs he had written.

“That was the impetus for doing all these projects,” Mr. Berns, 49, said in an interview this month. “We have this great catalog of known songs by an unknown songwriter, so what are we going to do with this? Really, for 20 years my sister and I were music publishers who really worked the catalog, that was our day job.”

But the rebirth of Bert Berns is not the standard feel-good story of recognition delayed and belatedly bestowed. It is accompanied by a deep sense of grievance, as well as accusations that he was deliberately denied his rightful place by powerful enemies in the music industry.

“To me, there is no doubt he has been overlooked and neglected,” said Brett Berns, who was 2 when his father died. “He’s not in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So, yes, there is a grievance. That’s why we set out on this mission to tell his story, to get him recognized and champion him.”

All three of the new works about Berns point a finger at the men who ran Atlantic Records: the Ertegun brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi, and their colleague, Mr. Wexler. They were partners with Berns in a label called Bang (Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, Gerald) but had a falling out that was acrimonious in the extreme: In “Here Comes the Night” (Counterpoint Press), Mr. Selvin writes that when he asked to talk about Berns, Mr. Wexler, who died in 2008, replied, “I don’t know where he’s buried, but if I did, I would” urinate “on his grave.”

According to these accounts, the Atlantic triumvirate tried to muscle Berns out of the music publishing part of the soured relationship by summoning Mafia contacts to threaten him. Rather than giving in, Mr. Berns prevailed by turning to a higher-ranking friend of his own in the mob, Thomas Eboli, who eventually became the boss of the Genovese crime family.

That goes against the standard version of pop music history, especially as regards Ahmet Ertegun, who died in 2006, 17 years after his brother, and cultivated an urbane, man-about-town image in his later years. “This is a revisionist history, a viewpoint from a different angle,” said Mr. Selvin, formerly a music critic at The San Francisco Chronicle and the author of several other books about pop music. “Berns is a figure who needs and deserves revision.”

The Berns boomlet can be said to have begun as early as 2008, when Ace Records, a British label, released the first of two CDs chronicling his abbreviated but hit-filled career, “Twist and Shout” and “Mr. Success.” A third installment, due out this year, will feature rarities recorded by the Shirelles, Wilson Pickett, Mr. Morrison and one of Berns’s main inspirations, the Cuban singer-guitarist Arsenio Rodríguez.

“I think the fact that he died in 1967, just as singer-songwriters were starting to displace the Brill Building professionals, is a reason why so many people have not heard of him,” said Mick Patrick, author of the extensively researched liner notes that accompany the project. “But without Bert Berns as their house producer, Atlantic Records may well have floundered” in the years preceding those changes.

Berns has always been especially admired in Britain, where his reputation was never eclipsed. When he started receiving royalty checks for songs that the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds and the Animals had made into hits, he was quick off the mark in sensing the opportunities there, and beginning in 1963, made trips to London to record performers like Them and Lulu, often with Mr. Page on electric guitar.

It was Berns who first brought Mr. Page to New York and introduced him to the Atlantic team, which signed his band Led Zeppelin just months after Berns’s death. The group recorded “Baby Come on Home (Tribute to Bert Berns)” at the sessions that yielded the first Led Zeppelin album, but the track ended up being left off the record and was released only in 1993.

It appears that even more efforts to raise Berns’s profile are yet to come. There is talk both of a movie and a tribute album in which today’s stars would sing some of Berns’s best-known compositions. In addition, his heirs recently signed a deal with MPL Communications, the music publishing company founded by Paul McCartney, an unabashed Berns fan, to distribute the more than 200 songs that make up the Berns catalog.

All that stands in sharp contrast to the reception Mr. Selvin received when he was trying to get his book project off the ground a decade or so ago. “You can’t imagine how many times editors and publishers said to me, ‘Nobody has ever heard of him,’ ” he recalled. “But that turned out to be the hook.”
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Just for fun:
cry to me: the stones
[www.youtube.com]

cry to me: solomon burke
[www.youtube.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2017-04-18 03:30 by hopkins.

Cheers Hopkins, great read, great viewing.

[m.youtube.com]

Vid above appears to have gone. Great photographs in this one.

This movie will be screening in New York at the IFC Center from April 26 to May 2, with some special events on April 27 and 28:

Thu Apr 27: Director Brett Berns, plus Richard Gottehrer & Jerry Goldstein from The Strangeloves in person at 7:15pm show!

Fri Apr 28: Director Brett Berns and Andrew Loog Oldham in person at 8:00pm show!

[www.ifccenter.com]

"In his first solo session, Van Morrison created the all-time classic “Brown Eyed Girl.” Van reflects on this unforgettable song in the new documentary ‘Bang! The Bert Berns Story.’" WATCH HERE

Bang! The Bert Berns Story Original Soundtrack:

01. Piece of My Heart (Erma Franklin)
02. A Little Bit of Soap (The Jarmels)
03. Tell Him (The Exciters)
04. Twist & Shout (The Isley Brothers)
05. Cry Baby (Garnet Mimms And The Enchanters)
06. Show Me Your Monkey (Kenny Hamber)
07. Baby, Please Don't Go (Them)
08. You May Be Holding My Baby (The Pussycats)
09. Everybody Needs Somebody to Love (Solomon Burke)
10. Here Comes the Night (Them)
11. I Want Candy (Single Version) (The Strangeloves)
12. Are You Lonely for Me Baby (Freddie Scott)
13. Mr. Success (Bobby Harris)
14. Chick-A-Boom (Original Mono Mix) (Van Morrison)
15. Hang On Sloopy (Single Version) (The McCoys)
16. Cry To Me (Freddie Scott)
17. Brown Eyed Girl (Original Stereo Mix) (Van Morrison)
18. Am I Grooving You (Freddie Scott)
19. Heart Be Still (Lorraine Ellison)
20. Piece of My Heart (Big Brother & The Holding Company)

Rolling Stones - Everybody Needs Somebody to Love

Rolling Stones - Hang On Sloopy

Rolling Stones - Cry To Me

The Barbarians (Live From Kilburn 1974) - Am I Grooving You

[www.amazon.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-04-29 08:10 by Cristiano Radtke.

Anybody knows if the movie is available otherwise than in selected movie theaters?
I really would like to see it.
Thank you,
Rockandroll,
Mops

This documentary will debut exclusively on Apple Music on October 24.

Apple Music — Bang! The Bert Berns Story





[www.macrumors.com]

How 'Bang!' Doc Rescues Sixties Hitmaker Bert Berns From Obscurity

Berns' son and film's narrator Steven Van Zandt on why story of songwriter for Van Morrison, Janis Joplin and other legends deserves to be told

BANG! The Bert Berns Story is now available on iTunes & includes an hour of extras including outtakes from Keith. Download here: [t.co]

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