So Gene said, you know, you guys are like three weeks late with this score. And um, I have to get it to Hall Wallace, and uh, and I need the songs now. It was probably done by somebody else, right? I'm sure. Like Mike Porter or someone like that.

Banjo Berman.

He sent Banjo Berman -- Aren't you glad you --

Start it over.

No, I'm not going to start it over. Why? You have an eraser in your pocket. So he sort of pushed his way into our little apartment in the Gorham. And uh, I was wondering what he was doing. And he closed the door and pulled a couch up in front of the door and he stretched out on the couch and he was a rather large guy at that time. I saw him maybe a year or two before he died, and he was not nearly that large. And uh, he stretched out on the sofa and uh, I said, like, you know, Gene, what are you going to do, go to sleep? And he said, I'm going to stay here on the sofa until you give my songs. And I said something like all of them? And he said, yes, all of them. So Mike and I, we decided we better write the songs because he was very big and the sofa was big. And we wanted to get out of there, because there was a lot of jazz in town and we wanted to get out and go to the clubs and all that. So here was this publisher who was like sort of threatening us. So we went to the piano and we worked all afternoon. And then --

And then we woke Gene up and we sang him four songs.

And he got up and left.

With the songs. Which were "Jailhouse Rock," "Treat Me Nice," "I Want To Be Free" and "You're So Square, Baby, I Don't Care."

And he gave us what we usually got, 25 dollars. And we went out and we spent it.

We had a ball.

What did that come to per song, 6 dollars and 98 cents?

25.

Okay, 6 dollars and 25 cents.

And then we went back to LA, and then we were called to come to the recording session of the songs. And uh, we actually functioned as the producers although with any credit.

Without portfolio.

Producers without portfolio or credit.

Money.

Or money. And Jerry was --

Or points.

Don't interrupt me, I'm telling an interesting story.

You think so.

I played piano on some of the numbers and I played piano in the rehearsal. And Jerry was more or less calling the shots on the floor and then from the booths. And when the session was finished, uh, we had all these songs recorded, and then they started to do the filming. And these were pre-records. And they called Jerry and asked him to come and play the part of the piano player. And Jerry said, but I don't play the piano. And they said, yeah, but you look like one.

That's really mean. I will get you for that.

And uh, then the day came that we had to go, one of us had to go to MGM and get fitted with a costume so to speak, and Jerry had to go to the dentist that day, so I went. They didn't really care, but they were concerned. They made me take my beard off because they said it would be a scene stealer. And uh, that's when I became a movie star.

And he never grew a beard again. And you know why? He wanted everybody to recognize him from then on as the piano player in the movie.

Touche.

Anything that you remarked on about the sort of feel or plan with that, with Elvis's guys as opposed to the kind of session players you usually played with?

Well --

Be kind.

They played a different style. You know, I was used to working in the studio with, um, with black musicians, uh, other than myself and Barney Kessel who played guitar on a lot of our Robins, almost all the Robins and Coasters records that we did in Los Angeles. And these guys were from a different part of the country, and they were white, you know, it was Bill Black and Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana. But it wasn't a, a difficult transition in terms of playing. It just sounded a little bit different.

Well, I sort of described what happened. The publisher walked in, he's very big, he laid, he moved the couch in front of the door, and he stretched out. And that's how you write songs on assignment. Because the guy says, unless you give me my songs you're not getting out of this room alive. Uh, the different sort of it is, and it doesn't always hold true that when you're writing songs on assignment, uh, you're writing them from a different place. You're writing them for the book or the play or the script and it doesn't really come out of you whole cloth. Uh, this is not to say that you can't write a real good song on assignment. I mean the greatest songwriters of all time, Berlin wrote on assignment. Uh, Johnny Mercer. Uh, who's that great songwriter --

Al Dubin.

Al Dubin.

Harry Warren.

Harry Warren, Frank Loesser, they wrote brilliant songs. I think there's something else there. I also think they were really major creators of songs and that they often named the movies after their songs, etc.

I think the difference is that you're writing for a character that somebody else created. Uh, as opposed to writing out of your own heart or your own sense of humor or your own --

Impulse.

Impulse, exactly.

That's pretty much the difference. And now I feel that a lot of the stuff, I've said this before, that a lot of this stuff that we wrote for movies, uh, like the Elvis Presley movies, not all of it, some of the stuff I think is real good. I think, uh, "Loving You" is a good song. Uh, it's a dead on copy of an Irving Berlin, uh, structure. Um, I think a couple of the songs we wrote for Elvis were good. But a lot of the things that we wrote for those movies I feel are not as good, for instance, as uh, the Coasters best songs, or our very best songs. They just, you know, they were sort of written by the pound. One of the reasons I think that they have, in fact I'm sure, have lasted as long as they have, and have the kind of reputation that they do have, is that Elvis sang them. And Elvis was so, uh, unique, and so wildly charismatic, that anything he touched became golden, and strangely superior. And I think that funny, that strange alchemy of, of Elvis and any material he sang, became untouchable and beyond criticism. And so a lot of these songs that people sing today and talk about as really great songs. I mean if you look at them under a jeweler's glass, they're mediocre. But Elvis Presley makes them great.

Can you address quickly the idea of the production number as per "Jailhouse Rock."

Oh, they want a production number.

That was it. That was a, a requisite for the script, was a production number to take place in a, uh, a sort of an amateur contest in prison. Uh, and that's what we wrote for them and called it "Jailhouse Rock."

See, originally it was called "Crime and Punishment." But they threw the script out, they said it wasn't commercial enough, and they said, we also need a couple of tunes. And we'd like a couple of rock and roll tunes because we don't want those old fuddy-duddy Tin Pan Alley songs.

We want to lighten it up a bit, you know?

And we want to get some costumes in there, black and white stripes, you know? So we went to work.

By the way, the, the version done in the film is not the version we cut in the studio. That one became the single, but the one in the film which was extended and has, uh, a bigger orchestra and so on and so forth, was the one that was used for a production number which included a lot of dance and so on and so forth.

It sounded like the Gene Krupa Big Band, right? It had a lot of swing in it.

Yeah, yeah. It was not, uh, really a rock and roll thing. It sounded more lie a swing era piece.

Did that give you a case of the shut-ups? I don't hear nothing from that corner.

Well, I guess the question is how did it develop that the Coasters became your really sort of personal vehicle, that all the groups and singers that you recorded with, that I guess starting at the beginning.

You know, I think one of the reasons, because I think there are many. One of the reasons -- oh, yeah, yeah, right. I think that one of the reasons that the Coasters, um, became our very personal voice, I could say voices, but I think I'm talking about the group and its voice, um, was that Mike and I are both in a way comedians in our own personal way. And I think, I've always been involved with theater. And I started out as an actor. And I think that, uh, I always wanted a troupe, a small troupe, a vaudeville troupe, a burlesque troupe of comedians and clowns to work with. And uh, this evolved because it started off with imitating, you know, the Midnighters and the Clovers and, you know, other groups. And uh, again, as I said earlier that there were many influences that were synthesized. And after we stop imitating, you know, we started getting our own ideas and these personal ideas of ours, his musically more or less and mine lyrically more or less, we superimposed on this hand picked group, because we finally hand picked this group. They didn't come intact. They were, you know, one singer from one place, another singer from another place.

And they evolved actually from, from the very inception to the peak of uh, the group.

And uh, that's, that's essentially what it was. Again it was a, uh, uh, a synthesis. I say it was instead of saying it was strictly blues, the music was R and B oriented with some other influences, some, a little jazz, a little some, you could even say rock 'n' roll later, later on. But the content was our version of our points of view about pop culture. What was going on, you know? And usually it was, it was a black take of white society acting or being foolish. Almost like the early toasts.

What about Carl, if you can say a few words about Carl Gardner and what in particular he brought to the whole mix.

Well, Carl Gardner had, first of all, a marvelous voice. And Carl really wanted to be a ballad singer. And at one time we did do some, some recordings that showed off this great ability of his. But in the context of the Coasters, he was kind of the, the straight man. He was the debonair, uh, straight man. As opposed to Billy Guy, who was the Rube, um, the street cat, or the gutter cat as the case might be. And the, uh, authority figure was the bass voice, Dub Jones. And then Cornell Gunther played the female roles, and uh --

Which was entirely appropriate.

Yeah.

And Speedo, when he got in the group was the real, the walkaway clown.

Right. And so they all had their, their --

Their roles.

Their roles and the relationship between them.

You know, it's like, really, it's a sort of commedia dell'arte troupe in terms of a rhythm and blues, you know, musical setting, with some, you know, maybe current journalistic ideas about what's going on.

And there was one other character really, which was the duet, which was Carl and Billy, which became different than either of them, and that was still another kind of character. They were, uh, pretty much a narrative.

Or like Homer and Jethro.

Yeah, yeah, like that.

Let's talk a little about "Searching" and "Youngblood" both. One thing that Carl said to us, I could maybe get a reaction to, was that he said that when you first brought in "Searching" that he or possibly he and some other members of the group thought that it was too country for the Coasters. Was that true?

I dimly remember that. I dimly remember that. Uh, and uh, I think that Mike and I were also in touch with real stinky country blues that had some country flavor to it.

It also had an old, very old-timey, uh, uh, kind of corny feel.

Could you say "Searching"?

"Searching" had in addition a very old-timey kind of corny, cornball feel, uh, which I, in the arrangement, it was a simple 1-3, and uh, if you notice in some of the breaks, which just happened and worked great, uh, Adolph Jacobs, the guitar player, played right on through the breaks.

It was really dumb. It was really animal dumb that record. And it, you know, and you felt it. And it worked.

Had a little piano lick on top. And when we made the session by the way, this was the last tune on the date and we had I think five minutes. And we said, well, what the heck, we might as well, even though it's, there's not much time to do any work on it, we might as well record it. And we got it in one take.

Now "Youngblood" came out of a Doc Pomus?

Well, here's what happened. I was in the office with Jerry Wexler at Atlantic one afternoon. And he had invited me home, to his home in Long Island for dinner. And um, we were driving out to his house, and he said, you know what? Doc Pomus laid a great title on me, but he's having trouble, he can't write the song, for some reason he's stumped. He said, will you consider writing, uh, the song with, uh, Doc. I said, yeah, well, but it's got to me and Stoller. He said, oh yeah, that's understood. Uh, and I said, well, yeah, well sure, what is it? And he said, uh, here's the title. He said, "Youngblood". I said, oh man, that sounds like jailbait, you know? That's dirty. And he said, would you write it. I said sure. And uh, by the time we got to -- this sounds like a running gag, right? By the time we got to Jerry Wexler's house, I had written the song. Um, and he got on the phone, I'd written about 80, 90 percent of the song. He got on the phone and called Doc up, and he said, Doc is it all right? A Jerry Wexler. A real Jerry Wexler. I write it before he finds out if Doc, if it's acceptable to Doc that I write it. And Doc said, sure, sure, of course, of course. And I called up Mike and told him I had this lyric. And I gave it to Mike and he wrote the music.

Well, we actually, I wrote it in Atlantic's recording studio in while we -- yeah, we were editing something in, in the other room, in the, you know, control booth, but we went out on the floor and I wrote the tune in the, uh, in the studio.

Tell the truth, you wrote the tune in the bathroom.

Well, only, only the bridge. Anyway, then we went and took it back to LA and recorded it in Los Angeles with the Coasters. Uh, we lost one of the Coasters that session and replaced him with, um, Young Jessie on that session.

Did you have any notion after you finished that record that, uh, that record, that might be the one that was really going to be the breakthrough.

No, I wasn't crazy about it. I was not crazy about "Youngblood." I was nuts about "Searching", but I thought it was like, it was not going to make it, but I personally loved "Searching." And I thought "Youngblood" was, well I can't say --

"Youngblood" took off first.

Yeah.

And actually got on the pop charts even.

I mean I was happy.

Which was, you know, quite a, quite a thing for us. Because we generally didn't get to the pop charts. We stayed on the R and B charts. But then "Searching" took over and lasted for months and months and months.

Any theories on why these tunes went pop as opposed to the things you tried earlier?

No.

I think it's a convergence of many things. I mean, I don't think there's a reason. I think there may be a half a dozen reasons. I think the business had, was changing. I think that the audience was getting larger, that there was a much bigger white audience for this kind of material than there ever had been. I think that the subject matter unwittingly, right, was getting a little broader, and it was, although I was never consciously aiming anything at any market, I never did, I think I was part of the music business, you know, and these lyrics and these stories became sort of, I think, signaled in on teenage, you know, kind audiences. Like the early stuff I wrote, I was imitating the great old blues singers. When I wrote things like "Real Ugly Women", well teenage kids don't buy songs about real ugly women, and teenage kids don't buy songs like Charles Brown singing "Hard Times," and you know they don't buy songs by Amos Milburn, like um --

"Bad Bad Whiskey".

"Bad Bad Whiskey". But they do buy songs about, you know, bad bad girls walking down the street, you know. So I think these things converged to make bigger audiences.

I think there was one particular thing, though, that, that made these records get on to the pop charts. And that was simply that Pat Boone didn't cover them, and neither did Georgia Gibbs.

You couldn't. Oh, by the way. It was almost impossible, nobody ever has except one great comedian.

Ray Stevens.

Ray Stevens is the only guy, and his stuff is so good, I love his work, always have. Hello, Ray. You couldn't make the Coasters records. It would take, any A and R man, you know, a year in the studio to duplicate them, they were so, they were put together like a Swiss watch. So you couldn't cover them. You had five different voices. We used to rehearse six or seven or eight weeks on a number. And they were, they were not duplicatable. And everybody knew it, you know? So they're kind of unique.