GEORGE GOLDNER, RECORD MAN: WINNING BIG, LOSING BIGGER

What he needed was a good shrink, not another visit to the track

A forgotten man today, George Goldner was, for a few years, the undisputed king, in New York at least, of the unruly world of early rock & roll. Here is a piece that I placed in 1991 in the same magazine, Goldmine, for which I wrote the original version of my previous Substack, on the pianist Paul Griffin. I don’t even know if Goldmine still exists, but it was there back when I needed it. Both pieces were byproducts of a book I was working on at the time, on the Brill Building era of pop.

That ‘91 Goldner profile is now little more than a first draft, so thoroughly have I rewritten it, which was tremendous fun. I’ve re-researched it, too, and I now know, and can share, much more about this enigmatic, ultimately unexplainable character than I did thirty-odd years ago. George Goldner had everything he needed to fight his way to the top—he did that almost without blinking—but was a serial self-saboteur. His partnership with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller as co-owners of the great little label Red Bird was initially fabulously fruitful. Red Bird hit big with songs like the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack,” written and produced by the gifted outsider artist Shadow Morton. But within two years, for reasons disclosed below, Goldner ran Red Bird into the ground. Leiber and Stoller sold out to Goldner for a dollar (which he had to borrow from Leiber) and got the hell out of there. Four years later, Goldner was dead. His legacy? Well, there’s the music, which will give pleasure for years, decades, to come. But what looms in one’s mind as well are the instances in which he sabotaged his extraordinary gift.

George Goldner, mid-1950s, in a rare pensive mood and sans his customary mohair suit

Rhythm & blues, which largely spawned rock & roll in the mid-1950s, was not a respectable business. Its artists and audience were underprivileged young Blacks and Hispanics, its entrepreneurs Italians and Jews generally unwelcome at “legacy” outfits such as Columbia and RCA. They were often financed by, or were, gangsters. 

George Goldner was not a gangster, though he had dealings with them. He was an exquisite dresser and a self-styled ladykiller; he spoke good Spanish and married a “fiery Latina,” in the day’s parlance; he was a great mambo dancer who frequented Manhattan’s Palladium Ballroom, and he had the surest ear for a hit record in early rock & roll. "George Goldner,” said the songwriter Jerry Leiber, “had the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old-girl. That’s the highest compliment you can pay someone in the business of selecting and selling singles."

Goldner squandered not one but several fortunes. A sequence repeated itself: start a record company, spot first-rate talent, cut hit records on them, and blow it all at the racetrack. Record labels—Rama, Gee, Tico, Roulette, Red Bird, and the appropriately named Gone and End—flew through Goldner’s hands like swallows. When he died, at 52, his one remaining label was in the hands of the Mafia.

Born Jacob Goldman, in 1919, to lower-middle-class Jewish immigrants, Goldner grew up in Turtle Bay, on midtown Manhattan’s east side. He began his professional life as a garment-district wholesaler, but the music business was, emphatically, where he wanted to be. If he loved to rhumba, he reasoned, so might the rest of the world, so he opened a chain of dancehalls. In 1948, he founded Tico Records, signed the hottest Latin talent of the day—Machito, Mongo Santamaria, Candido, Tito Puente—put them on the Catskills circuit, and, when he deemed their stage manner sufficiently polished, booked Carnegie Hall for a spectacular “Mambo Rhumba Festival” on February 20, 1954. The event was a sort of Latin equivalent to John Hammond’s 1938-’39 “From Spirituals to Swing” concerts at Carnegie, which brought blues, boogie-woogie, and swing to the august venue. 

By 1953, Goldner had a new interest, rhythm & blues. The term itself was new, coined in 1949 to replace "race music," which had been in use since the early 1920s.¹ “Gee,” the first, and only, hit by four Harlem street-corner harmonizers who called themselves the Crows, (another now-offensive name), reached #2 on Billboard’s R&B chart and #14 on the pop chart, one of the first big crossovers from rhythm and blues to the pop mainstream. “Gee” was on Goldner’s recently founded Rama Records.

Goldner’s next hitmakers kicked the door between R&B and pop wide open. Richard Barrett was a singer and Goldner’s right-hand man (and, as I learned when I visited him in 1991, an extremely tough, if not menacing, character who, in his earlier years, was said to carry a gun). Tired of having his sleep interrupted by five young guys who harmonized, for his benefit, underneath his bedroom window at 165th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, Barrett auditioned the kids, who called themselves the Teenagers.² Impressed especially by the thirteen-year-old lead singer, Frankie Lymon, Barrett took the fellows downtown to sing for Goldner.

“Downtown meant white,” wrote Calvin Trillin in a 1991 New Yorker article largely about the unsavoriness of early rock & roll. “It didn't mean RCA Victor. In the mid-fifties, respectable, mainstream pop music—the kind heard on records put out by Victor and Capitol and Decca—was dominated by crooners. The attitude of the pop-music industry toward rhythm & blues and rock & roll was largely, to quote from testimony given before a 1958 congressional committee, that the music was "the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear," that it was written and sung "for the most part by cretinous goons," and that "by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly—lewd—in plain fact dirty -lyrics ... [it] manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.” The speaker was a crooner terrified for his career, Frank Sinatra.

Released in autumn, 1955, the Teenagers’ “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” was a big fat hit, leapfrogging speedily up Billboard’s pop chart to #6. Goldner and his three labels, Rama, Tico, and Gee, were conclusively out of the R&B ghetto. The Teenagers, now Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “didn’t play the Apollo,” wrote Trillin; “they played the Ed Sullivan Show.” Goldner zipped them into a squeaky-clean package: “processed hair,” writes Trillin, “and the sort of clothes familiar from Hollywood movies of the Forties, including letter sweaters.” Lymon, said one of his fellow Teenagers was, “extremely talented and bright and very cocky.” It’s hard to watch him and not think of the Michael Jackson of “I Want You Back".” Unlike Jackson’s, Lymon’s stardom lasted all of 18 months. A heroin addict at 15, a has-been before he was out of his teens, he was dead at 25.

“The producers who actually put out rhythm-and-blues records were on the fringes of the industry,” Trillin writes—”hustling independents who were sometimes imaginative in their judgments and always creative in their bookkeeping.” When “Why Do Fools” came out, the writers listed were Frankie Lymon and George Goldner, though Goldner had nothing to do with the song’s composition (nor, probably, had Barrett, who insisted for a while that he, too, was a co-writer. Still another tough guy, Morris Levy—the toughest, who owned Roulette Records and co-owned the famous jazz club Birdland—also claimed co-credit for “Why Do Falls Fall in Love.”³

“It was common practice in the fifties,” Trillin writes, “for an R&B record producer to tell a group that he’d have to have a writing credit if it wanted its song recorded—or to put his name on the copyright application without telling the group anything.” “I made some changes in the lyric,” Levy would say at a deposition at which three women claimed to be Lymon’s widow. Songwriting, Levy explained to the court, was a collaborative process. "It's not like you see a composer sitting at a piano and writing a whole bunch of music," he testified ."I think I would be misleading you if I said I wrote songs, per se, like Chopin." “What Goldner [and Levy] did was common practice,” Richard Bennett, a copyright lawyer who represented one of Lymon’s putative widows, told Trillin. “The record business in those days,” said Bennett, “had a system of morality that was slightly below the Mafia.”

Compared to another label owner, Brunswick Records’ Nat Tarnopol, Goldner was a pillar of generosity and civility. Whether the following story is true or not, it serves as a symbol of the artist/owner relationship of the day. When Tarnopol’s star, the magnificent singer Jackie Wilson, expressed a desire to switch labels, Tarnopol it’s said, had Wilson dangled by his ankles from an office window until the terrified singer agreed to stay with Brunswick.

Flush with Lymon and the Teenagers’ success, Goldner moved his operation from Tenth Avenue, or Nowheresville, to 1650 Broadway, which, by the late 1950s, had replaced an earlier legend—1619 Broadway, the Brill Building—as the day’s essential music-business address. His handsome new offices were a sort of Potemkin Village, hiding the shambles Goldner was making of his life. Even before the move, he had demoted himself from CEO of Tico, Rama, and Gee to co-owner, selling half of his share to a man of inch-high moral stature, Joe Kolsky, an associate of Morris Levy.

In 1958, Little Anthony and the Imperials, recently signed to a new Goldner imprint, End, sent their debut single, “Tears On My Pillow,” to #3 pop. Given Goldner’s early- and mid-’60s roster (The Isley Brothers, the brilliant Shadow Morton and his protégés the Shangri-Las, the Dixie Cups, the Ad Libs, and others) it took real energy—compulsiveness is the more accurate word—to go broke.

Watching George Goldner breeze into 1650 of a morning, one would hardly suspect that his world was in turmoil. Meticulous and vain, Goldner “would take a half-hour to put his tie on,” said Shadow Morton, whose first music-business job was as Goldner’s chauffeur.⁴ As was the norm among record men of the 1950s, ‘60s, and still later, Goldner handled his own promotion, crisscrossing the USA, Morton at the wheel, dropping in on deejays with a briefcase full of 45s and pocketsful of cash. (Payola was not merely an open secret; it was legal until 1960.) When Goldner visited Tom Clay, the top jock at Detroit’s CKLW, his first words were, “How much are you making a week?’

“One-fifty.”

“They oughtta be hung,” Goldner snorted. “Buddy, I’m going to make you a fortune.” Handing Clay a record, he said, ‘I’m giving you five percent of everything this record makes in Detroit.’” Goldner, who came to consider Clay a protégé, was full of advice. “Look,” he once told Clay, “so-and-so is coming to town and he’ll have a briefcase full of ties and jackets. Tell him you don’t want that shit, you want cash.”

Goldner was a man with a method, lots of them. “George might have hundreds in one jacket pocket, twenties in the other, tens in his pants,” Shadow Morton told me. “He hands the station manager a bill. ‘Get your wife some roses for me, huh?’ Tells the disc jockey, ‘Hey, have a night on the town.’ Another bill. Finally he gives one each to the two kids sweeping up. Back outside, I said, ‘George, I think you reached in the wrong pockets. You gave the boss a ten, the errand boys a hundred each.’ George said, ‘The man here don’t pick the hits.’”

Filmed here before an audience of well-behaved young white folk, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ “I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent” was Goldner’s effort to assuage whites that America’s Black and Hispanic ghetto-dwellers were not all planning to rob, rape, and murder them. (The song flopped nonetheless, failing to chart.) Far from arguing for equality, song and video clip actually uphold good old American racism, with a black minstrel group having the time of their lives entertaining an all-white audience. Lymon may not have been a juvenile delinquent, but he was one one year away from the heroin addiction that ultimately killed him.

In his testimony at Congress’s 1960 payola hearings, Goldner admitted, without prompting, to paying for airplay. Reading the proceedings, one can almost hear the interrogator’s amazement at Goldner’s candor. “You, sir, are the first witness who has testified that payments were given for the purpose of having records played over the air.” Given Goldner’s personality, especially in this setting, one can hardly help but conclude that his openness was one more instance of self-destructiveness. 

Shadow Morton was in such awe of his boss “that it wasn’t until years later,” he said, “that I realized that George had never not been in a money crisis.” Declaring bankruptcy in 1958, Goldner sold his labels—he owned five now—to Morris Levy. Flush again in no time, he moved his family from Jackson Heights, Queens to Scarsdale. On the day they arrived, Goldner and his wife reportedly fought so noisily that the neighbors tried to buy them out on the spot. Or was it that Scarsdale’s haute bourgeoisie were horrified to have in their midst a grubby associate of the infamous Alan Freed, the DJ brought low by the early-’60s payola scandal?

By 1964, broke again, Goldner decided he’d try to talk Jerry Leiber and his partner Mike Stoller into turning their new label, Red Bird, into a three-way partnership. A business disaster had left Leiber and Stoller with a huge pile of records, none of which they considered saleable. Here, at the exact right moment, was the man with the golden ear.

“I’m going to be straight with you, George,” said Leiber. “Mike and I are about to go under. We need help. You got great ears and you know how to sell. You’ve got the best track record of anyone on both coasts.”

“Do you have unreleased product?” Goldner asked.

“Yeah,” Leiber said.

“‘Is it any good?’”

“‘To tell you the truth, George, I no longer know. We need fresh ears.’”

“‘I’ll listen to what you got.’”

“‘When?’”

“‘Now.’”

Mike Stoller felt a ray of hope. “George Goldner had an amazing track record. He had signed Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez, Joe Cuba, and Eddie Palmieri. He had put out Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love,’ Little Anthony and the Imperials’ ‘Tears on My Pillow’ and ‘Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-ko Bop,’ the Chantels’ ‘Maybe,’ and the Flamingos ‘I Only Have Eyes For You.’” A deal was struck. If Goldner heard a potential hit in the pile and flogged it into an actual hit, Leiber and Stoller would give him a stake in Red Bird. Although it was almost midnight, Goldner asked for the keys to Red Bird’s office.

When Leiber and Stoller arrived at work, Goldner was buoyant and “fresh as a daisy,” writes Stoller. “George turned to me,” Leiber writes, “said, ‘This is it,’ and handed me an acetate.” Leiber knew the song, by three young women from New Orleans who called themselves the Mel-Tones. He hated it.

“Oh God,” he said, “it’s that piece of shit.” 

“I’ll bet my life on it,” said Goldner.

The song was “Chapel of Love.” Since Mel Tormé was already using the Mel-Tones’ name for his band, a new one was in order. “There was talk of naming them Little Miss and the Muffets,” Stoller said. “I suggested ‘the Dixie Cups.’” Recorded in February, 1964 and released in April, “Chapel of Love” knocked the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” from the #1 slot on June 6th, and stayed there for three weeks.

Goldner had, it seemed, saved Red Bird. Of the label’s 30 releases, 18 charted. Some were monsters: “Chapel of Love,” the Ad Libs’ “Boy from New York City” (#8), and Shadow Morton’s many contributions, including the Shangri-Las’ “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” (#5) and “Leader of the Pack” (#1), the ultimate teen-death disc, complete with amazingly realistic (for its day) sound effects. The Shangri-Las’ “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” if not a monster (it peaked at #18) had tremendously refreshing bad-girl sass. Their thick Queens accents notwithstanding, the Shangri-Las were, as was the nation, ingesting—had already ingested, and in a matter of days, it seemed, and seems—the cheeky insouciance of the four Liverpudlians. (The Shangri-Las, in fact, sometimes opened for the Beatles on tour.)

Two great ones, virtual opposites in mood, written and produced by Shadow Morton and sung by the Shangri-Las. The lead singer, Mary Weiss—the long-haired blonde—was the essence of teen vulnerability and rebellion.

But Red Bird’s money was vanishing as quickly as it arrived. “Remember, this was George Goldner’s company,” says an informed observer. “Whatever went on the books, twice that went in the trunk of someone’s car.” What Goldner was doing, somehow unobserved, was pressing and shipping thousands of copies of every Red Bird hit to California, where it was sold by a company called George Goldner Enterprises. Goldner’s gambling debts, meanwhile, had grown to such proportions that he’d had recourse to loan sharks, who were draining the label. “Guys started showing up,” Leiber recalled, “brutes who could barely fit through the door. Seeing these thugs hanging around our office acting as though they were part of the enterprise was a weight that neither Mike nor I could bear. There was only one answer.” 

One March morning in 1966, Goldner was in his office reading the Daily Racing Form when Leiber and Stoller appeared. “We’re tired of the record business,” Leiber said. “We want to concentrate on writing and publishing. We’re giving you our share of Red Bird.” The charge was one dollar. 

Goldner didn’t have a dollar. 

“No problem,” said Stoller, reaching into his pocket. “Jerome, lend this dollar to Mr. Goldner.”

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Goldner said.

“Believe it,” Leiber said. “We’re gone.”

Within months, Goldner had sold Red Bird to a wealthy Nashville label owner. He tried fitfully to start a new label, but suffered a fatal heart attack in 1970—fittingly, on April 15th. He had the Achillean grace not to outlive his glory years.

In 1991, I sat down with Hy Weiss, a tough old buzzard who had run the R&B independent Old Town Records until the late 1970s. He was Goldner’s contemporary and had known him well. Weiss had grieved; even though he knew that Goldner was ill, he was shocked when his effervescent friend died.

“I remember George as vividly as if I’d seen him this afternoon,” Weiss said, “and he’s been dead twenty years. He was that kind of guy. I happened to like him, with all his faux pas. The last time I talked to him, he was sick. He wasn’t supposed to talk on the phone. So he calls me up. I was watching a Rangers game. He says, ‘Gimme a piece of your action.’ I says, ‘George, if you die, when am I gonna get paid? George laughs. What happened next? George went.”

“George and me,” said Weiss, “guys like us were destined to go broke. We lived for today. If I got a hot record, I took off for a year. Goldner, the same. Guys like Ahmet [Ertegun, Atlantic Records’s co-founder and longtime president] were smarter. They built for tomorrow.”

The summer before Goldner died, he looked up Tom Clay, whom he hadn’t seen in years. Clay was dong well, DJing at Manhattan’s WCBS-FM. The two began meeting for lunch. On every occasion, Goldner wept almost nonstop. He was in love with a married woman who lived in California.

“He never had a record for me,” said Clay, “never so much as mentioned records. All he talked about was this lady out on the coast. It was as if he’d left the business. I’d known George in the days in which he lit up a room just by showing up. I felt in him the same sadness I’d felt in Alan Freed ten years earlier. George had given up.”

To understand Goldner’s business—dressing Harlem teenagers in creased slacks and letter-sweaters, sending them into Top Ten orbit while pocketing the larger portion of their earnings, dropping in on DJs with a fat bankroll—is to understand the rock & roll business in its infancy and childhood. Goldner was a prototype, of great interest and use to the music historian. Yet what lodges deepest in my mind is his helplessness, the way in which he almost systematically undercut his substantial achievements. To regard Goldner as he probably regarded himself until near the end—as a raffish Sky Masterson of a rogue—is to miss what I feel was at his core. Watching, as if safely on the observer’s side of a cage, or a diorama—watching Goldner self-destruct, one begins to feel powerless oneself, unable to intervene, to set, and keep, this gifted man on a true course. It’s a sad story, the self-unmaking of a self-made man.

1. It was Jerry Wexler, a Billboard reporter and later a successful record producer and label executive, who came up with the new name.

2. Here was another new term, for a literally newly born, largely American, subspecies. Used largely in white suburbia, “teenager” was thus an aspirational term for these young Harlemites, an effort to blend in with their white, middle-class, suburban contemporaries and ingratiate themselves with the latter’s potentially, if not actually, hostile parents. Before World War II, adolescents were encouraged to go to work and start families of their own. With increased leisure time and the decade’s unprecedented prosperity, the American adolescent of the 1950s had time to kill and money to spend. The teenager’s disreputable alter ego, the “juvenile delinquent,” was much discussed, and bemoaned, in the day’s magazine feature stories, newspaper editorials, and radio talk shows. A 1956 song by the Teenagers, “I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent” (written, or credited to, Goldner) was designed to further ingratiate a group that was highly threatening to white America, the Black adolescent.

3. Re Levy: Even if one were to overlook his rarely disputed ties to the mob—I wouldn’t hesitate to call him a gangster—he broke the law as casually as he crossed the street. Levy was convicted of extortion in 1988, sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $200,000. He died of liver cancer at Sunnyview Farm, his 1,500-acre racehorse-breeding operation in upstate New York’s Columbia County before he could begin his sentence. 

4. “I named him Shadow,” said Jerry Leiber of Morton, “because he appeared in the room without your realizing that he ever walked in. And he was never there when you looked for him. He was good-looking and packed a self-invented mythology that intrigued me. He had a sweet temperament and was physically strong as a bull. Mostly, he had a genius for writing songs that were teenage soap operas. I loved Shadow and everything he did for Red Bird.” I can attest to that “sweet temperament”; in our several meetings, Morton was immensely likeable and down-to-earth, with an amused, candid manner. Although he battled alcoholism, Morton maintained his creativity well past rock & roll’s early days, producing several songs that can only be called iconic—Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child” (1966) and the Vanilla Fudge’s utterly reworked cover of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”—as well as the less iconic Too Much Too Soon, the second, 1974, album by David Johansen and Johnny Thunders’ New York Dolls. Morton died at 71, in 2013.