There were three buildings: the Brill Building (1619 Broadway), 1697 Broadway which is now the Ed Sullivan Theater where David Letterman does his show, and 1650 Broadway. And all these buildings had fly-by-night record companies, so for a hundred bucks... you would take a group off the street, and you would hire an arranger, and they would bring in three or four [musicians] from Birdland, and they would cut these records.

And what's interesting about it is that these guys were phenomenal jazz players. In those days there was no such thing as a rock and roll musician. The Rolling Stones or the Beatles, they hadn't come on the scene yet. If you wanted to make a record you basically wrote the song a capella, and you came in and they would hire these guys from Birdland. That's why on a lot of the 50's records you hear these amazing saxophone solos, and they're basically bebop solos.

People trivialize that music... for example, WFUV in New York, they play great stuff, and they have a program they call "Morning Becomes Eclectic," but for some reason they never play this stuff and it's kind of a pet peeve of mine - they really should. If you really take the time out to listen to these records, they're really unbelievable jazz records with these sort of naive songs. I like to call it "teenage jazz," but that's just me.

We made a couple of records and we appeared on a couple of local TV shows. Alan Freed had a TV show on Channel 5 (which was then called Dumont), and on Channel 13 there was Clay Cole. You lip-synched to your records. Then I met a guy who was singing with The Mystics ["Hush-a-Bye"], and we wound up forming a group and got an audition with the two most successful independent record producers in the world, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

Most people know Leiber and Stoller as songwriters.

They wrote "Hound Dog," "Yakety Yak," "Charlie Brown," and they produced Big Mama Thornton's version of "Hound Dog" (before Elvis's), Wilbur Harris's version of "Kansas City," and a whole bunch of blues performers who were trying to cross over. Before they came to New York they produced the Robins ("Smokey Joe's Cafe"). When they came to New York they brought some of the Robins with them and changed the name to the Coasters. These songs were amazing social commentaries about certain groups of people.

They not only wrote all of those songs, they were the producers, and on those records the sax player was King Curtis.

In those days an engineer understood how to mike a room. It was like Weegee taking a photograph - you had one chance to capture what was going on in the room... you can "hear the room" in those recordings. When we did it, it was stereo - you had two tracks and you had to put the lead vocal on one track and just about everything else on the other track.