Episode 55: “Searchin'” by the Coasters

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 55

Searching by The Coasters

It's been a while since we last looked at the careers of Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller.

The last we heard of them, they had just put out a hit record with Riot in Cell Block No.

9 by The Robins, and they had seen Elvis Presley put out a cover version of a song they had written for Big Mama Thornton, Hound Dog.

That hit record had caused a permanent breach between them and Johnny Otis, who had been credited as a co-writer on Hound Dog right up until the point it looked like becoming a big hit, but then had been eased out of the songwriting credits.

But Lieber and Stoller were, with the help of Lester Sill, starting to establish themselves as some of the preeminent songwriters and producers in the RB field.

Their production career started as a result of the original Hound Dog, Big Mama Thornton's version.

That record had sold a million or so copies, according to the notoriously dodgy statistics of the time, but Lieber and Stoller had seen no money from it.

Mike Stoller's father, Abe, had been furious at how little they'd made for writing it, and had suggested that they should form their own record company, so they could make sure that if they had any more hits, they would get their fair share of the money.

Lester Sill, their business associate, suggested that as well as a record company, they should form a publishing company.

Abe Stoller had recently inherited some money from his father, and while Sill was broke himself, he had a friend, Jack Jake the Snake Levy, who would happily chip in money for an equal share of the company.

So they formed Spark Records and Quintet Publishing, with Lieber, Mike Stoller and Sill handling the music side of the business, and Jake the Snake and Abe Stoller providing the money, with each of the five partners having an equal share in the companies.

The first record the new label put out was a record by a duo called Woolly and Ruth, in the Gene and Eunice

The song was a Libra and Stella original, as almost everything released on Spark was, although it was based around the old My Bucket's Got a Hole in It melody.

But the act that had the most success on Spark, and to which Lieber and Stoller were devoting the most attention, was the Robins.

Now, we've already talked, back in the episode on The Wallflower, about one of the Robins hits on Spark Records, Riot and Cell Block No.

9.

But Lieber and Stoller did a lot more work with them than just that one hit.

They'd worked with the group before forming Spark.

Indeed, the very first song they'd had released was That's What the Good Book Says by The Robins, and were eager to sign them up once they got their label up and running.

While the Robins had started as a four-piece group, their line-up had slowly expanded.

Grady Chapman had joined them as a fifth member in 1953, becoming their joint lead singer with Bobby Nunn and singing leads on tracks like Ten Days in Jail.

She said my name up.

It was a frame up.

Somebody saved me.

Oh,

But Chapman himself ended up in jail, and so they took on Carl Gardner as a lead vocalist in Chapman's place.

Gardner didn't really want to be in a vocal group.

He was a solo singer, and had moved to LA to become a pop singer with the big bands.

But Johnny Otis had explained to him that there was no longer much of a market for solo singers in the big band style, and that if he was going to make it as a singer in the current market, he was going to have to join a vocal group.

Gardner originally only joined for ten days, while Chapman was serving a short jail sentence.

But then Chapman didn't come back straight away, and by the time he did, Gardner was firmly established in the group, and the Robins became a sextet for for a while.

While Chapman was out of the group, the rest of them had recorded not only Riot in Cell Block No.

9, but also several other hits, most notably Smokey Joe's Cafe, which featured Gardner on lead vocals and was also written by Lieber and Stoller.

But when Chapman returned, Gardner and Chapman started sharing the lead vocals between them.

But they only had one recording session where this was the case, before problems started to surface in the group.

Gardner was, by his own account at least, far more ambitious than the rest of the group, who were quite reluctant to have any greater level of success than they were already getting, while Gardner wanted to become a major star.

Gardner claimed in his autobiography that one of the reasons for this reluctance was that most of the robins were were also pimps and were making more money from that than from singing and that they didn't want to give up that money.

Whatever the reason there were tensions within the group and not only about their relative levels of ambition.

Gardner believed that RB was going to be a passing fad and was pushing for the group to go more in the big band style, which he was convinced was going to make a comeback.

But there were other problems.

Abe Stoller was was disappointed to see that the venture he had invested in, which he'd believed was going to make everyone rich, was losing money, like most other independent labels.

Despite this, Lieber and Stoller continued to pump out great records for the Robins, including records like The Hatchet Man, a response to Billy Ward and the Domino's 60 Minute Man.

so long, they call me the hatchet man.

You can find me in the parlour with my hatchet in my hand.

Top top,

many of the other songs they recorded had a certain amount of social commentary mixed in with the humor, as in framed, which was, for the time, a rather pointed look at the way the law treated, and still treats, black men.

Poured whiskey on my head, turned around to the jury and said, convict this man, he's drunk.

What could I do?

But no matter how good the records they put out were, there was still the fact that the label wasn't bringing in money.

And Libra and Stola were having other problems.

Stoller's mother had died from what seemed to be suicide, while Lieber had been the driver in a car accident that had left one woman dead.

Both were sunk in depression.

But then Jerry Lieber bumped into Neshui Ertigan at the home of a mutual friend.

Ertigan was an admirer of Lieber and Stoller's writing and said he wanted to get to know Lieber better, and invited Lieber along on his honeymoon.

Ertugen was about to get married, and he was planning to spend much of his honeymoon playing tennis while his wife went swimming.

He invited Lieber to join them on their honeymoon, so he would always have a tennis partner.

The two quickly became good friends, and Ertugen made Lieber and Stoller a proposition.

It was clear to Ertigun that Lieber and Stoller made great records, but that Spark Records had no understanding of how to get those records out to the public.

So he put them in touch with his brother, Armet Ertigan, at Atlantic Records, who agreed to give Libra and Stoller a freelance contract with Atlantic.

They became, according to everything I've read, the first freelance production team ever in the US.

Though I strongly suspect that that depends on how you define freelance production team.

They had contracts to make whatever records they wanted, independently of Atlantic's organisation, and Atlantic would then release and distribute those records on their new label, Atco.

And they took the Robins with them, or, at least, some of the Robins.

The group found out that it was losing two of its members in the middle of the session for the song that was going to be the follow-up to Smokey Joe's Cafe,

Cherry Lips.

Cherry Lips.

Cherry lips, cherry lips.

Tell me, tell me, do

how do I, how do I, how do I rave with you?

Cherry lips, cherry lips, sweet as sugar cane.

Kiss me, kiss me,

That song was going to be a lead vocal for Karl Gardner, but just as the session started, Lieber and Stoller walked in with some legal documents.

No one has ever been clear as to what exactly those documents were, and Gardner later claimed that they were faked, while Lieber and Stoller always said that that wasn't the case and that Gardner had already signed to Atco.

But the documents were enough to extricate Gardner from the session.

Grady Martin sang lead on the song instead.

Carl Gardner and Bobby Nunn were now part of Lieber, Stoller, and Sill's new project with Atco.

The rest of the Robins weren't.

There has been quite a bit of confusion as to exactly why Lieber and Stoller only wanted two of the Robins to come across with them.

Carl Gardner claimed that Lieber and Stoller wanted to get him away from the rest of the the group, who he and they considered unhealthy influences.

Ty Terrell, one of the other Robins, always claimed that Lieber and Stoller wanted people who would be easier to control, and that they were paying Gardner and Nunn far less money than the other Robins wanted.

And Lieber and Stoller claimed that they just thought the others weren't very good.

Mike Stoller said The Richard Brothers and Ty Terrell didn't sing Leith at all.

They usually sang doo wa doo-wa and had their hands up in the air.

I suspect myself that it's a combination of reasons, but whatever caused the split, Gardner and Nunn were off into the new group, leaving the other four to carry on without them.

Without Gardner and Nunn, the Robins continued recording for a few years, but stopped having hits.

To add insult to injury, many of the Robins' last few singles on Spark were included on the first album by the new group, The Coasters, listed as Coasters recordings.

To this day, if you buy a Coasters compilation, you're likely to find Riot in Cell Block No.

9 and Smokey Joe's Cafe on there.

For their new group, Gardner and Nun teamed up with new singers Leon Hughes and Billy Guy, along with the guitarist Adolph Jacobs.

Billy Guy had been part of a duo known as Bip and Bop, who had recorded a Kokomo knockoff, Dingaling, backed by Johnny's Combo, the name Johnny Otis had used when backing Gene and Eunice on Kokomo.

cutie.

And the bells began to ring.

Ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling.

Ding-dong-ding.

Ding-a-ling-ding-a-ling.

Hughes, meanwhile, had been one of the many, many singers who had been in the stew of different groups that had formed the Hollywood Flames, the Penguins, and the Platters.

He had been in the Hollywood Flames for a while, at a time when their line-up was in constant flux.

He had been in the group when Curtis Williams, who formed the Penguins, was still in the group, and when he left the Flames, he was replaced by Gaynell Hodge, who had just quit the Platters.

While he was in the Hollywood Flames, they recorded songs like this.

I keep on smiling

Even though my baby's gone

away

Yes,

the reason why I'm so happy

Cause I know she's coming back to me someday

So this new group had the two strongest vocalists from the Robins, plus two other experienced singers.

Carl Gardner was still in two minds about this, because he still wanted to be a solo artist, not part of a group, and when they came together he seems to have been under the impression that they were being formed as his backing group, rather than as a group that would include him as just one of the members.

Lester Sill became the new group's manager, and largely took charge of their career.

The group became known as the Coasters, supposedly because they were from the West Coast, but recording for a label on the East Coast.

Carl Gardner would later claim that the group's name was his idea, and that it was originally intended that they be promoted as Carl Gardner and the Coasters, but that when he saw the label on the first record, he was horrified to see that it just said the Coasters, with no mention of Gardner's name as the lead singer.

there's a crazy little place that I know.

To where the drinks are hotter than the chilly sauce.

And the boss is a cat named Joe.

He wears a red bandana, plays a blue piano in a honky tongue, down in Mexico.

He wears a purple sash and a black mustache

in a honky tongue.

Everything seemed at first to be looking good for the coasters.

Karl Gardner was happy with the other members, as they seemed to be as hungry for success as he was, and they went out on tour while Stoller went on holiday in Europe,

and the boat he was on sunk on the way back.

He and his wife survived, however, and when he got off the rescue boat, he was greeted by Lieber, who informed him that Elvis Presley had just recorded Hound Dog, and they were going to make a lot of money money as a result.

But the distraction caused by that, and by the other factors in Lieber and Stoller's life, meant that for much of the rest of the year they were occupied with things other than the Coasters.

The Coasters kept touring, and Lieber and Stoller relocated to New York, where they started making records for other Atlantic acts.

They started a relationship with the Drifters that would last for years and through many different line-ups of the group.

This one, by the Drifters' 10th lineup, became a top 10 RB single.

Just hang on one silly moon,

they also recorded Lucky Lips with Ruth Brown.

When I was just a little girl with long and silky curls,

my mama told me, Honey, you've got more than other girls.

Now you may not be good looking,

That became her first single to hit the pop charts, since Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean, four years earlier.

But Lieber and Stola were still going through all sorts of personal problems, ping-ponging from coast to coast, and apart from each other for months at a time.

At one point, Lieber relocated again to LA, and Stoller stayed behind in New York, playing piano on records like Big Joe Turner's Teenage Letter.

But eventually they were together for long enough to write more songs for the Coasters.

Their next work with the group was a double-sided spash hit.

Youngblood was a collaboration with another writer.

Doc Thomas' birth name was Jerome Felder, but he'd taken on his stage name when he decided to become a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner or Jimmy Rushing.

Thomas was not a normal blues shouter, he was an extremely fat Jewish man who used crutches to get around as his legs were paralysed with post-polio syndrome.

Thomas had been recording for labels like chess since 1944, and many of the records were very good.

While they call me Doc, I can make you feel so good.

Do more for you than any man in this neighborhood.

If you ever feel stiff around your back, send for me and you'll hear it back.

Pummas had become a central figure in the group of musicians around Atlantic Records, performing regularly with people like Mickey Baker, King Curtis, and the jazz vibraphone player Milt Jackson.

But no matter how many records he made, he'd not had any success as a singer, and he'd fairly recently decided to move into songwriting instead.

The year before, he'd written Lonely Avenue, which had been a minor hit for Ray Charles.

My little girl wouldn't say I knew.

Well, I feel so sad and blue, and it's all because of you.

I could cry, I could cry, I could cry.

But he didn't really understand this new rock and roll music.

He was a fan of jump blues and swing bands like Count Basie's, not this newer music aimed at a younger audience, and so his songwriting hadn't been massively successful either.

He was casting around for a songwriting partner who did understand the new music, so far without success.

But Lieber and Stoller liked Pomas a lot.

Not only did they like Lonely Avenue and the records he'd been making recently, but Stoller even had fond memories of a radio jingle Pomas had written and recorded for a pants shop in Brooklyn, which he remembered from growing up.

Pomas had written a song called Youngblood, which he thought had potential, but it wasn't quite right.

Depending on what version of Events you believe, Lieber and Stoller either radically reworked the song, or threw away everything except the title, which they thought had immense commercial potential, and wrote a whole new song around it.

Either way, the song was a huge success, and Pomas was grateful for his share of the credit and royalties, while Libra and Stuller were happy to give someone they admired a boost.

look at them,

tell me what you mean,

young blood,

I can't get you out of my mind.

Youngblood was ostensibly the A side of the single that resulted, but the record that actually made the biggest splash was the B side, Searchin', which had Billy Guy singing lead.

The song was one of Lieb Van Stoller's best, and showed Lieber's sense of humour to its best effect, as Guy sang about how he was going to be a better detective than Charlie Chan or Sam Spade in tracking down his missing girlfriend.

I don't matter where he's the high be the young

here for me you're coming.

I'm gonna walk right down that street like a boat dog running.

Cause I live fans.

On this session, Leon Hughes wasn't present.

I've not seen any explanation from anyone involved as to why he was absent, but his place was taken by young Jesse.

Young Jesse was a singer who had previously been a member of The Flares with Richard Berry, and had later recorded a handful of solo records for Modern Records, and had signed a contract with Lieber and Stoller.

Around the time of the session, Young Jesse released this, with Lieber and Stoller producing Ferratco.

shot stingers, proven to the music you see.

Shuffle in the gravel.

But they still won't do that.

Shovel in the gravel ridge.

They do the dance they call the popcorn.

They got it from Keep Harry.

But this still won't do that.

Despite what some people have said, young Jesse never became a full-time member of the Coasters, though he did later tour with a group calling itself the Coasters, led by Leon Hughes, and the original line-up of the group continued touring for a while.

After the success of Searchin' and Youngblood, Atco-released a series of flop singles, all of which, like the hit, featured one side with a Carl Gardner lead vocal, and the other with a Billy Guy lead.

Some of these, like Idol with the Golden Head, were classic Libre and Stoller story songs, along the lines of the earlier Robins records, but they didn't yet quite have the classic coasters sound.

Got down on my knees and began to pray.

I said, Idol, tell me where's my big foot made.

But then, towards the end of the year, the group split up.

It's hard to tell exactly what happened, as most of the stories about who left the group and why have been told by people who were involved, most of whom wanted to bolster their own later legal cases for ownership of the coaster's name.

But whatever actually happened, Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn were out of the group suddenly.

Depending on which version of the story you believe, they either got tired of the road and wanted to see their families, or they were sacked mid-tour because of their behaviour.

For one recording session, Tommy Evans from The Drifters substituted for Hughes and Nunn, until Lester Sill went out and found two replacement members, Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones.

We've met Gunter before.

He was part of the collection of singers who were all in half a dozen different groups centred around Gainel Hodge.

He had been an early member of the Platters, and had also been in The Flares with Richard Berry and young Jesse, and had recorded a handful of solo singles.

I was dancing with June.

The band played a tune,

a real pretty tune.

When she turned and looked my way,

that's when I fell

in love.

Gunter was also unusual for the time in being an out-gay man and was initially apprehensive about joining the group in case the other members were homophobic.

For the time, they weren't, especially.

Carl Gardner apparently felt the need to let Gunther know that he was straight himself and wouldn't be interested, but they took a live-and-let-live attitude, and Gunter quickly became friendly with the rest of the group.

Dub Jones, meanwhile, had been the bass singer for the Cadets and had done the spoken word vocals on their biggest hit, Stranded in the Jungle.

I passed in the jungle

But how was I to know that the wreckage of my plane had been picked up and spotted in my girl in Love's Lane?

And meanwhile, back in the States,

Jones would quickly become an integral part of the group's sound.

This new line-up met for the first time on the plane to a gig in Hawaii, and Gardner at least was very worried that these new singers would not be able to fit in with the routines the others had already worked out.

He had no need to worry.

It only took one quick rehearsal, before the the show for Gunter and Jones to slot in perfectly, and the classic line-up of the coasters was now in place.

Lieber and Stoller loved working with the Coasters, but it had been almost a year since they'd written the group a hit at this point.

Hound Dog had been a big enough success for Elvis that his management team wanted more from Lieber and Stoller and fast, and most of their most commercial work in 1957 went to Elvis.

But that changed in 1958, and the Coasters were the beneficiaries.

We'll be picking up with Lieber, Stoller, and Elvis in a few weeks' time.

And a few weeks after that, we'll see what happened when they got back into the studio with the Coasters.

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