Baby It's You

[grooverider]

"Baby It's You" a new musical celebrating Florence Greenberg who founded Scepter Records begins on October 11th (or Oct. 17th, according to the web site...babyitsyoumusical.com) according to the ad in the newspaper that I saw. The ad states "she launched the careers of Carole King, Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach..." It is at the Coast Playhouse on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, CA.

It should be interesting as there doesn't seem to have been as much interest in Ms. Greenberg as there has been to the artists she championed.

[An Enormous BB Fan]

Imagine some housewife from New Jersey starting a record company that becomes hugely successful. There's a great story there to be told, and I'm surprised a book or movie hasn't been written about this lady. I wonder what her relationship with Burt was like? Was she motherly to him? Did they ever socialize? Or was it strictly business? I mean, after Burt and Hal had so many hits, wouldn't you think that Florence would have invited Burt and Hal over to her house for dinner? Or did things not go like that?

Could you imagine all the stories Burt has to tell? Obviously, he's not the type to write an autobiography, but I'd be first on line to buy the book, that's for sure!

[steveo_1965]

Florence G.from what I have read, was a "tough"boss....and ran the
company according to her own dictates...she did not like a lot of the songs Burt and Hal wrote..including "Make It Easy On Yourself"...
she had her own tastes, but found the team of Bacharach David useful
as business associates. . .especially in their writing and producing Scepter Artists...
She had a son, who also was a procducer, whom I met, back in the 70's, Stan Green(berg) who was partially, if not legally blind.I found him to be savvy,and a nice
person ...this, from when Scepter opened up an office in Los Angeles (he ran the west coast part)
Steveo

[BachtoBacharach]

A bit of trivia: Alan Freed's wife Inga was a secretary at Scepter in the late 1960s. According to a friend who also worked at Scepter in the 1960s, Burt and Hal's relationship with Florence was strictly business and they rarely socalized with Florence Greenberg or other staff at Scepter. Scepter moved offices from 1217 Broadway to 254 W. 54th Street in Manhattan in 1965 (the same building as CBS Television City and later Studio 54). Scepter had a studio in the building, but the studio was rarely used (Velvet Underground cut a couple of demo sides there before they became known-the demo tapes recently were found and sold at auction for mega-bucks, Guess Who and Canned Heat also cut sides at Scepter Studios in the mid-sixties) but Burt used Bell sound and later A & R Studios. Ed Smith was the engineer at Bell and Phil Ramone was the engineer at A & R. Both engineers worked closely with Burt, Hal and Dionne and they are responsible for some of the most unique sounding recordings. It was Ed Smith and Gary Chester's idea to directly mike the head of the of the bass drum for the intro to Do You Know the Way to San Jose. Before 1966, Burt recorded Dionne primarily at Bell Sound but by mid-1966 he used A & R for almost all their sessions, although he recorded San Jose at Bell in 1967. Bette Midler was planning to make a motion picture about Florence Greenberg and was to portray Florence herself in the early 1990s but the project fell through when there was a dispute regarding the rights to some early Scepter recordings. Wonder who would have played Burt, Hal, Dionne, BJ, The Shirelles etc. It would have been a great movie!

[An Enormous BB Fan]

Thanks steveo and BachtoBacharach for this information. As a fan of Burt's (and that whole "Brill Building" era, It's good stuff to know).

[BachtoBacharach]

Here is Florence Greenberg's obit from the NY Times:

November 4, 1995
Florence Greenberg, 82, Pop-Record Producer
By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR.
Florence Greenberg, a one-time New Jersey housewife who parlayed an unlikely hit record by a teen-age group known as the Shirelles into an improbable career as the proprietor of a leading independent label of the 1960's, died on Thursday at the Hackensack University Medical Center. She was 82, and lived in Teaneck, N.J.

As a pioneering woman in the male-dominated world of rhythm-and-blues, Mrs. Greenberg was, by her own later account, a triple anomaly: "a white woman who was in a black business and who couldn't carry a tune."

Maybe so, but she had a finely tuned ear for popular music, a keen eye for talent and a driving ambition, all of which became increasingly apparent in the 1960's.

In addition to a series of hits by the Shirelles, among them "Dedicated to the One I Love," "Tonight's the Night," and Mrs. Greenberg's own composition, "Soldier Boy," her Scepter label produced such 1960's standards as "Louie, Louie," by the Kingsmen; "Twist and Shout," by the Isley Brothers, and "Walk on By," by Dionne Warwick, not to mention "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," the Burt Bacharach-Hal David song, sung by B. J. Thomas on the soundtrack of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which won an Academy Award in 1969.

Mrs. Greenberg traced her success to a day in 1957 when her 16-year-old daughter, Mary Jane, came home raving about the performance of four classmates at a Passaic High School assembly.

Their names were Shirley Alston, Addie Harris, Doris Kenner and Beverly Lee, but they called themselves the Shirelles, and as soon as Mrs. Greenberg persuaded them to sing for her, she knew that their song, "I Met Him on a Sunday," had the makings of a hit.

A former Republican campaign worker who had translated her political skills into a job peddling songs for a local songwriters, Mrs. Greenberg, who had been married to an accountant, had already become a familiar figure on Tin Pan Alley, hobnobbing with music-industry hopefuls at the old Turf restaurant on Broadway at 51st Street. She had also joined with two partners to form a label, Tiara Records.

The Tiara release of "I Met Him on a Sunday" was such an immediate success. Within months, Mrs. Greenberg climbed so many radio-station stairs, sold so many records from the trunk of her car and created such demand that her company could not handle the orders. So she sold the Shirelles' contract to Decca, an industry giant.

That might have been the end of her career, but, Decca, convinced that the Shirelles would be a one-hit phenomenon, returned the group to Mrs. Greenberg, who formed Scepter to replace Tiara.

Over the next decade, Scepter became an industry sensation as Mrs. Greenberg, whose company eventually occupied an entire floor of 1650 Broadway, repeatedly demonstrated her sure sense of talent.

This was never more evident than the day in 1962 when Mr. Bacharach played a demonstration record of one of his songs for Mrs. Greenberg, and she told him that while she did not like the song she loved the singer.

The next day, Mr. Bacharach returned, saying he had a signed contract with the singer, a young woman named Dionne Warwick.

Partly because of the long line of hit Warwick releases that followed, Gulf & Western offered $6 million for Scepter in 1965, but Mrs. Greenberg declined to sell.

It was, she later said, a major mistake. Within a decade, as major labels came to dominate the distribution network, Scepter's success had faded, and by the time the company folded in 1977 Mrs. Greenberg had lost everything.

In recent years, Mrs. Greenberg had been cheered by Bette Midler's plans to make a movie of her life, but because Ms. Midler has been unable to secure the required rights from two of the three surviving Shirelles (Ms. Harris died in 1982), the project is dormant.

She is survived by her daughter, Mary Jane Goff of Upper Saddle River, N.J.; a son, Stanley, of Los Angeles; six grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

[An Enormous BB Fan]

Very interesting, thanks!

And Florence wrote "Soldier Boy"?????