Wiser Angels
Dr. John, Doc Pomus, Joel Dorn, and the magic of doo-wop with Aaron Neville
Mac Rebennack and Doc Pomus started writing together after both had already had successful careers for a number of years. Pomus was a singer in the 1940s and ‘50s, turning to songwriting in the late ‘50s. Working in the Brill Building, Pomus and songwriting partner Mort Shuman turned out a number of songs that became hit records: "A Teenager In Love," "Save the Last Dance For Me," "This Magic Moment," "Little Sister," and "Can't Get Used to Losing You." Pomus also wrote with Phil Spector as well as Lieber & Stoller.
Rebennack was the youngest A&R man in record industry history (and still is), hired at age 16 by Johnny Vincent at Ace Records. He learned the music industry in the trenches, recording artists for local labels. Following a gunshot injury that left him unable to play guitar he took up the piano before being arrested on drug charges and sent to Fort Worth. Upon release he moved to California and became an ace studio musician. He concocted a persona, Dr. John the Night Tripper, a combination musician, performer, and medicine man, and was a success.
By the mid-1970s things had slowed down for both men. Pomus was living in a two bedroom apartment in the Westover Hotel on 72nd Street. There he continued to write with a variety of musical partners who included Ken Hirsh and Willie DeVille. Rebennack had moved to New York as well, and he and Pomus became not just songwriting partners, but true friends.
At the end of the decade, Rebennack signed a deal with Horizon, an imprint of A&M Records that featured their jazz artists. For the first album Rebennack recorded City Lights with Tommy LiPuma producing and a team of studio aces that included Hugh McCracken, Richard Tee, Will Lee, John Tropea, Steve Gadd, Plas Johnson, and David Sanborn. Released in 1979, City Lights would be Mac's first album in five years. Mac wrote or co-wrote all of the material on the album, a departure from most of his ‘70s work where he was recording music written by other songwriters.
Rebennack and Pomus wrote three songs for the album. Two of these, "Dance Away the Night With You" and "City Lights" are as good as anything either man ever wrote.
We could drink until we get real high,
Try to drink every bar dry.
Taste so good that high price stuff
You never know when you've had enough.
But there is nothin' I would rather do
Than to dance, dance the night away with you.
“Dance the Night Away With You”, Mac Rebennack and Doc Pomus, City Lights
The song opens with Rebennack's jaunty piano, evolving into a gently rolling New Orleans-style number that recalls "Such a Night." But there's a world-weariness to his vocal and a sophistication to the whole thing that hadn't been heard on his recordings before. Rebennack's horn and rhythm arrangement fits right into the song's pocket.
City Lights contains elements of the New Orleans music that had made Dr. John a household name for a time, but they are tempered by a long life of living ‘on the street side' and the themes here are themes of loneliness, melancholy, lost love, lost dreams, nostalgia, and having a good laugh at it all with your best friend. The music is more subtle than the bar full of college kids party atmosphere of some of his earlier albums and it completely eschews the excesses of his Night Tripper days. There are gorgeous sax solos by Sanborn and Johnson. To some it will sound less gritty and therefore less energized than his earlier work. But it opened doors for Rebennack, who spent much of the '80s doing commercial jingle work (Popeye's Chicken) and playing his brand of New Orleans music live around the world.
"City Lights included songs that me and Doc Pomus wrote, songs that me and Billy Charles wrote. From that experience I came into contact with cats like Hugh McCracken, Steve Gadd, Richard Tee, and other New York dudes. I really dug that record. The songs on it opened up a lot of spaces for me. I fell into slots I hadn't fallen into before - jazz slots, and things. Jazz stations in L.A. and New York were playing cuts from City Lights. I mean, I took a band on the road that had in it David Sanborn, Steve Gadd, people like that. It was a whole different thing than I was used to." (quotation from liner notes to Mos Scocious: The Dr. John Anthology)
The title track, which ends the album, is a blast from the classic era of 50's songwriting and singing. Opening with Claus Ogerman's strings, the track sounds like a Dinah Washington or Etta James classic. Then comes Mac's bluesy piano, and the lyrics that paint the picture so well: "Too many city lights/too many midnights on the wrong side of life..."
Doc Pomus was also a friend and mentor to record producer Joel Dorn, known by the '70s as 'The Masked Announcer' from his days as a jazz DJ in Philidelphia. Dorn had produced jazz sides for labels like Atlantic and musicians like Les McCann, Roland Kirk, and John Coltrane. Pomus introduced Dorn to Bette Midler and Dorn ended up producing The Divine Miss M. He ended up producing a number of left-field pop artists including Peter Allen, Mose Allison, and Leon Redbone.
It was Pomus who hipped him to the Neville Brothers, who Dorn also ended up producing. “He called me up one day and he said ‘You wanna hear the greatest bar band in the world? And the best singer living?’ Yeah, who wouldn’t wanna do that? So I met him at the Bottom Line, I saw the Nevilles. I went nuts. It was very difficult to get a deal. Eventually, Bette Midler spoke to Jerry Moss, who was one of the owners of A&M at the time, and she convinced him that it was a worthwhile act."
The album Dorn produced was the classic Fiyo on the Bayou, but it went nowhere in part because the label insisted on marketing it as an R&B album. The Nevilles went on to be a successful act in the '80s, and in 1986 Dorn teamed up with Aaron Neville and released an EP titled Orchid in the Storm, a project whose song selection was based largely on Joel and Aaron's shared love of doo-wop and '50s music.
I talked with Dorn about Orchid in a 2002 interview and asked him about the genesis of the project.
“I had an idea to do an album called Wiser Angels" he explained. "And what I was gonna do is I was gonna cut sides with Aaron, some sides with Dusty Springfield, and some sides with Frankie Valli. The premise of the album was these are all people who had gigantic hits in the fifties and sixties, maybe disappeared from the public view for a moment or so, but when they resurfaced, were even stronger or had matured in a very impressive way from where they had started.
So I cut one side with Dusty and then she didn’t want to continue with the project. Frankie and I never got in the studio, and I cut the five sides with Aaron, and instead of an LP I had an EP. I just think that I happened to catch him at a time when he was…his purest. I don’t know of a better way to say it. And the reason we tuned to the fifties stuff was that both of us loved that music. And he’s the best. I mean, there’s nobody living who can do the fifties stuff like him.”
Orchid In The Storm is truly a minor classic, featuring Aaron’s breathtakingly gorgeous renditions of “Pledging My Love,” “For Your Precious Love,” “The Ten Commandments of Love,” “Earth Angel,” and a medley with brother Art on “This Is My Story” and “We Belong Together.” The original tracks also feature Art Neville on keyboards, and the tenor sax work of David “Fathead” Newman as well as the arrangements of Wardell Quezergue.
Orchid in the Storm was one of the first recordings Dorn reissued on his Hyena Records label around the turn of the century, adding a few tracks to flesh it out into an album. “Orchid is very special to me” writes Dorn in his liner notes, “I didn’t wanna add anything inappropriate, anything that didn’t fit the vibe.” The additional tracks are “Mona Lisa” from the Nevilles album Fiyo on the Bayou, which Dorn also produced, “Save the Last Dance For Me” from a Doc Pomus tribute album, “Warm Your Heart,” a Drifters number produced by Linda Ronstadt and George Massenberg, and the “Mickey Mouse March” from Hal Willner’s Disney tribute album. They fill out the original EP material splendidly without detracting from its perfection.
Bonus Tracks:
"My brother Art was a doo-wopper. He had a group that sat out on a park bench in New Orleans and sang harmonies at night, and they'd go around and win all the talent shows and get all the girls, you know. So I would run up and try to sing, and he'd run me away — 'Get away from me, kid' — until they figured I could hold a note, and they let me sing with them."
--Aaron Neville-- Inside Aaron Neville’s Doo-Wop World
@chrishawtree is writing about Alex Halberstadt’s biography Lonely Avenue, The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus, but he spins the life and career of the legendary songwriter in a revealing way in this well-tuned essay. Christopher Hawtree, The Last Dance of Doc Pomus in The Telegraph, 08/16/2007
Dr. John performing “City Lights” at the Bottom Line in NYC 11/08/78 together with a review of the show at Paste .
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