The girls in the front rows of the Brooklyn Paramount used to swoon over Jimmy Gallagher. Down at Palisades Park, they would scream when he closed his eyes soulfully and hit the falsetto notes.
Gallagher, as the lead singer of the Passions, was a brief, bright flash across the Cash Box Top 40 in 1959. His group had four or five semi-hits, including Just to Be With You and Gloria.
Today, Gallagher is a telephone technician in Davie. And his audience is a bunch of middle-aged doo-woppers who call themselves the South Florida Group Harmony Association. In the 1950s, they helped lay the foundation for today’s rock music with their rhythm and blues-based harmonizing. These days, you can find them shoobeedooing in local parks on weekends.
So it’s no surprise that Remember Then (Remem-mem remem-mem-member remem-mem remem-mem-member remem-mem remem-mem-member then, then, remember then) is one of the most requested songs at association meetings.
“It’s the greatest — making the same music today that we all did years ago as kids,” Gallagher says.
The doo-wop sound boiled up from the sidewalks of New York and Philadelphia, first among black teens and then picked up by whites. The songs featured realistic lyrics sung against a background of nonsense syllables that filled in for instruments.
Lines such as yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-mum-mum-mum-mum-mum-mum get a job drove parents crazy. And they, in turn, drove the kids out of the house and onto the pavement, turning doo-wop into the street-corner symphonies of the 1950s, voices reverberating off the concrete, unaccompanied by music.
“If we had a street light, a corner and a bottle of wine, we sang,” recalls doo-wopper Bruce Goldie, who spent his youth in the Bronx and makes a living today selling real estate.
This day, Goldie and Gallagher are singing together at Hollywood’s Topeekeegee Yugnee Park during one of the association’s monthly meetings. “Just happy to be singing for people who appreciate it,” says Gallagher, who has come a long way from the stage of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.
Gone are the three trim, neatly dressed Passions from his Brooklyn Red Hook neighborhood who sang backup in matching white sweaters and white bucks. Singing with him at the park are four graying association members, hats taking the place of pompadours, bellies stretching T-shirts.
Besides Goldie, there is Bob “The Oldie Man” Pianka, host of WLRN (94.3 FM), public radio’s 11-year-old rock revival show and a Miami video producer. There is Steve Stern, who doo-wopped growing up in the Bronx and now runs Sunshine Kids children’s clothing stores in west Broward County. Hitting the bass notes is Lenny Citrin, a Kendall property manager, originally part of the Brooklyn group Vito and the Salutations.
Others take a place behind the microphones, depending on the song. There is a bass singer who used to be with the Excellents and another who sang with the Bob Knight Four. There are members of the Queens-based Imaginations and the Brooklyn Fascinators. And everybody is waiting for Dion DiMucci, who sometimes wanders in.
In the Still of the Night and Blue Moon float out over the park. Former bobby-soxers, well into motherhood, mouth the words silently in the shade of the pavilion. A couple Hula-Hoop on the lawn. A woman walks around the edge of the small crowd, searching for her youth: “Anybody here from James Madison High?” Thick New Yawk accents fill the air as a singer warbles, “Dere you ah, little stah.”
Taking it all in are Alan “Dr. Doo-wop” Seifer and Ron Mitro, a couple of fortysomething oldies fanatics who founded the harmony association a year ago. Seifer is a Coral Gables physician who drives a Jaguar XJS with “Dr. Doo- wop” vanity plates and has a collection of 45s numbering in the thousands. Mitro is a Sweetwater city commissioner.
They met a year ago in a restaurant after winning dinners in a name-that- artist contest on the radio. Seifer named the lead singer. Mitro, calling next, named the group.
Seifer wanted to be a star when he was younger, “but I lacked two qualities: I couldn’t sing and I couldn’t play an instrument. So I went to medical school.”
He later moved from Queens and established a family practice next to Baptist Hospital in south Dade County. But between treating endless sore throats, meeting a payroll and bringing up a 12-year-old son, Seifer hungered for those simpler times when his biggest problem was getting to the Jamaica High School auditorium early enough to hear the Cleftones harmonizing.
He shared his feelings with Mitro, and the two of them formed the group harmony association, patterned after United Group Harmony in New Jersey, which has 2,000 members. At their most recent meeting, the South Florida association gathered about 100 members under the TY Park pavilion.
One of them is a genuine rock ‘n’ roll pioneer, a retired owner of Herald- Ember Records who lives at Inverrary in Lauderhill. The doo-woppers cluster around him. They still listen to the records he produced 30 years ago and now hang on his every word.
“The first record we did (in the early 1950s) was a big hit. Shake a Hand by Alice Faye. Her real name was Alice Scruggs, but we didn’t like that,” Al Silver says. As he talks, he fingers a dime-sized gold record suspended from a chain around his neck.
Silver promoted a parade of minor rhythm and blues songs through the early 1950s until he signed a black group called the Silhouettes. A few days after the pressings in 1955, Silver mailed a copy of the group’s new song, Get a Job, to Dick Clark. The disc jockey played it on his show and when Silver walked in his office the next morning, there were back orders for 500,000 records. It sold about 2 million.
A year later, Silver heard a song recorded in the basement of an East Haven, Conn., Catholic Church called In the Still of the Night. It became a classic for The Five Satins and Herald-Ember.
Kids flocked to Herald-Ember’s studios, hoping for a break. Silver plowed from radio station to radio station, pushing his records.
But in 1964, Herald-Ember was swept away by the Beatles invasion and Silver sold off all rights to the more than 800 records in his catalog. It was a very costly decision.
“Who knew from this oldies stuff back then?” Silver says.
In the Still of the Night hit No. 24 in 1956 for Silver and had a brief comeback in 1960. It since has sold an estimated 20 million copies on various revival albums.
“Maurice Williams saw the movie Dirty Dancing, heard his song Stay, which I released in 1960. He gave me a call,” Silver tells those gathered around him. “‘I ain’t getting a penny from this, Al,’ Maurice said. ‘That makes two of us, Maurice.’
“I don’t have anything left. All I got is memories. That’s why I like this,” Silver says, motioning to the others. “They remember.”
