The East Coast's Hitsville: NY's Doo-Wop Scene -CultureSonar

Before producer Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, 1950s teens in New York were making their own version. Hordes of teenagers would sing between their high school’s restroom walls, hoping their echoing voices would attract the attention of the opposite sex and not their principal.

The result: the city’s five boroughs had tons of doo-wop groups and small record labels. The Brooklyn-based Mystics had a #20 hit in 1959 with “Hushabye,” and the group later had Paul Simon as a member for two years.

Another Brooklynite, Neil Diamond, wrote his first song, “Hear Them Bells,” at the age of sixteen for Jayne Posner, his girlfriend who later became his first wife. Neil recalled in a 1972 New York Times interview that he wrote the doo-wop song because: “I wanted to impress her and I couldn’t afford to buy her a gift. It was about as dumb as you can get, but it was a song.”

City teens found that writing and singing songs kept them out of trouble. In a 2012 interview with the Classic Urban Harmony website, Sammy Strain recalled that Charles “Kinrod” Johnson met Nathaniel Epps in the Warwick, NY State School for Boys, a minimum security juvenile prison where troublemakers faced strict marching orders from the guards. Kinrod remembered. “We’d be on line, and in order to keep it straight, stay on the beat, I’d chant stuff like ‘on the hubba wonda luva hubba!’”

After the two teens did their time, they formed The Chips and a ditty inspired by their hungry times. Sammy stated, “Kinrod would say, ‘The other day I had a cool water sandwich and a Sunday-go-to-meeting bun. The other day I ate a ricochet biscuit. Well, that’s the kind of biscuit that’s supposed to bounce off the wall back in your mouth. If it don’t bounce back–You go hungry!”

The novelty song, “Rubber Biscuit,” never landed on the charts, but the record landed in the apartment of Martin Scorsese, then a fourteen-year-old boy in Little Italy who used the tune in his 1973 movie Mean Streets.

Five years after that film’s release, Strain was reading a magazine article about the Blues Brothers’ debut album. He recalled: “It said ‘one of the standout songs on the album is ‘Rubber Biscuit.’ We weren’t affiliated with anybody at the time. We had to go down to BMI and reaffiliate with them, and we found that we had a lot of back money with BMI. We hired an attorney. That’s why we still get royalties today.”

Unfortunately, many of these doo-woppers were done wrong by their managers. George Goldner, who managed Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, told the three composers of “Why Do Falls Fall in Love?” that only two names could be put on the copyright. Faster than you can sing “ram-a-lama-ding-dong,” Goldner listed himself and Lymon as the tune’s two writers.

Goldner, a heavy gambler, later sold his half copyright to Roulette Records owner and mob associate, Morris Levy (whom “Hesh Rabkin” in The Sopranos was based on). Some members of the group later sued the Levy estate in 1992 for a piece of the song’s publishing pie. In court proceedings, it came out that Levy, who died in 1990, had threatened to kill group members who challenged him. A jury believed that the ex-Teens wrote the song, and they were awarded $4 million. However, they later lost the case on appeal to the estate of “songwriter” Levy and Lymon.

When doo-wop groups weren’t being exploited, they were being neglected. One forgotten singer was Eugene Pitt of the Jive Five, who had his group’s 1961 tune, “My True Story,” co-produced in 2013 by Keith Richards.

Keith jumped at the chance to produce Aaron Neville on his own doo-wop album, noting, “I’ve been waiting years to do this. I’ve grown up with these songs as Aaron did.” Thanks to Keith, who, as co-producer Don Was noted, had “just watched the Jive Five on a TV special,” Pitt was hired to provide background vocals on Neville’s album My True Story.

Most doo-wop singers’ careers were as short-lived as the labels that released their records. But Dion DiMucci’s cool voice has stood the test of time. He added vocals to Lou Reed’s 1989 “Dirty Boulevard” song and had his pal, Paul Simon, sing with him on his 2016 song “New York is My Home.” The Wanderer, a bio-musical about Dion’s life, played at the Papermill Playhouse in New Jersey in 2022 but hasn’t made it to Broadway yet.

Dion learned well from his friends, songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, that the real money in music was in publishing. In a 2019 interview on Miriam Linna’s Crashing the Party podcast, the singer stated, “Someone told me that publishing is your retirement plan. Who cared about a retirement plan back then? And I started a publishing company, which is the reason I can pay rent without worrying today. I eat like King Farouk because of Lieber and Stoller.”

In a February 14, 2019 interview with Forbes, Dion recalled his time on the ill-fated “Winter Dance Party” tour with Buddy Holly, Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens: “Buddy chartered a Beechcraft Bonanza [to Fargo, ND from Clear Lake, IA] and said, ‘There’s only four seats on the plane and there’s room for three others. So let’s flip a coin to see who gets to fly and who goes on the bus.’ Ritchie was sick and wasn’t crazy about flying. Anyway, we flipped the coin and I won the toss. Then we found out it was going to cost $36 for each of us. When Buddy said $36, a light went off in my head because my father paid that monthly for rent in the Bronx. So I thought, ‘I’m not going to spend a whole month’s rent just for a flight.’ My primary reason for not going was the $36! So I said to Ritchie, ‘Please, you go on the plane. I’ll watch your guitars.’ Buddy then said to me: ‘Watch my guitar, too. Take care of it like you would take care of your testicles.’ Those three guys affected my life. Buddy told me, ‘I don’t know how to succeed, but I know how to fail. Try to please everybody and you’ll go nowhere.’ If he didn’t tell me that, I probably never would’ve done ‘Runaround Sue,’ ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘Abraham, Martin and John.’”