Sometimes You Just Write Off the Hundred Dollars
“Well here I am and there they go
And I guess that you’d just call it my bad luck.
I hope he rests in peace, the trouble is
The fella owes me forty bucks”
— Ballad of Forty Dollars, Tom T. Hall, 1968
When Mark del Costello died on March 7, at the age of 74, he owed me a hundred bucks. Well, technically he owed it to my wife, who some years ago sent him $100 for a set of DVDs from a 1983 concert he produced in Pemberton, New Jersey.
Trouble is, he never produced the DVDs.
Unlike the cemetery maintenance man in Tom T. Hall’s wonderful song, however, I couldn’t get too upset at Mark del Costello. I was frustrated, sure, along with everyone else who sent him their hundred dollars and got only the sound of silence. But angry, no, not really, because that 1983 concert, which my wife and I attended, was one of the two or three best shows I have ever seen. And while someone else theoretically could have produced it, no one else did.
What’s come to be known as The Burlington County Concert, I should add, wasn’t one for which most music fans would share my enduring enthusiasm.
It was comprised entirely of 1950s-style rhythm and blues vocal groups, a distinct sound that produced some mainstream artists like the Platters and some mainstream hits like “Why Do Fools Fall In Love,” “Come Go With Me” or “Little Star,” and also had a much wider scope that was and is cherished by a modest and devoted band of fans and collectors. Oh, and those vocal groups also directly shaped the better-known black popular music of the 1960s, from the Temptations and the Four Tops to Wilson Pickett, the Miracles, the Vandellas, Percy Sledge, the Shirelles and Aaron Neville.
Unfortunately for its fans and artists, this sound has over the years been stuffed into a box labeled “doo-wop,” an unfortunate term that suggests it was just a bunch of ephemeral novelty songs (“Rama Lama Ding Dong”).
Still, enough music fans appreciated it that over the next 30 or 40 years, concert producers would periodically find and reunite 1950s groups, most of whose members had long since moved on to jobs that paid enough money to live on.
At one point these shows could fill Radio City. But no single show ever assembled a lineup like the one del Costello put together on Sept. 11, 1983, at Burlington County College.
It wasn’t just that several groups were among the royalty of the R&B vocal group world, like the Five Keys and the Spaniels, but that both those groups included all five original members, for the first time in decades. Some of the other groups on the show had top-40 hits, like the Jive Five’s “My True Story” or the Limelites’s “Daddy’s Home.” Some had sold decently in the R&B market, like the Channels, the Harptones, the Laddins/Desires and the Swallows. Others, like the Cherokees and the Rainbows, made wonderful records whose quality far exceeded their distribution.
“Vocal group harmony music has never been taken seriously as a musical form,” del Costello said before the show. “It sounds so damn simple until you hear a group actually work on an arrangement. The Five Keys were singing with Count Basie arrangements.”
Del Costello hoped to turn the Burlington County Concert into a multi-part documentary, perhaps interspersed with artist interviews, and he said he already had serious interest from, among others, Japanese television and Warner Brothers.
Accordingly, he staged it in what was really a production studio, designed to maximize audio and video capture. An audience was almost an afterthought and with tickets priced at a steep $75 and Pemberton being in the middle of nowhere, maybe half the 150 or so seats were filled.
Anyone who has ever attended a taping knows delays are endemic. This show was scheduled to start at 2:30 p.m. and last six or seven hours, with two breaks. It started closer to 4 and didn’t finish until almost 3 in the morning. By the time it ended, it had featured 16 to 20 groups, depending on how you counted the mix-and-match, with 91 performers doing 106 songs.
Musically, there was a lot of wonderful. The Five Keys kicked it off with an exceptional 10-song performance, leaving subsequent groups to wonder exactly how they could follow that. Perfect? No concert is perfect. As a document of the 1950s vocal group sound, closing in on the last time the original performers and voices were still intact, it delivered what del Costello promised.
And then the rest happened. Or didn’t.
To the chagrin of both fans and the artists to whom del Costello had painted an enticing picture of a career revival, he never produced that video feature. Years went by. He talked about deals scuttled, people backing out on him. He said he had finally decided to release a DVD set himself when someone broke into his car, stole the tapes and released a cheap bootleg version that undercut his market. The market from whom he had been collecting pre-sale money.
As much as he loved the musical result, he said, he was also wrestling with a deep financial deficit. He estimated he had spent $45,000 producing the show, and in its immediate afterglow he said he expected to sell the video package for about $200,000. When the glow faded, he later said he had lost $35,000, which he said he gradually made up by producing mainstream shows with artists up to the level of Linda Ronstadt and James Brown.
That’s not a bad Plan B, especially for someone who didn’t start as a music producer, just a fan who parlayed his skill as a photographer into a gig shooting pictures at Philadelphia’s Electric Factory in the mid-‘70s. He was a good get for them, because he had a terrific photographic eye. Years later, when I did some interviews for another music documentary on which he was working, I took my payment in photographs. As I type this, I’m looking at Little Richard.
He also got involved in film, which he taught at both Burlington County College and the Art Institute of Philadelphia. The showcase line on his film resume was working as a photographer for and then an assistant to Martin Scorsese when Scorsese was filming Raging Bull and King of Comedy.
In his biography, del Costello described how he and Scorsese would sit around late at night listening to and marveling at del Costello’s obscure R&B records.
Since Scorsese clearly loves great vintage music, this was a cool story, and a few years later I asked Scorsese about it. He brushed the question off, which I mention not as a posthumous “gotcha,” but to suggest del Costello had a hustler side that perhaps inflated some of his stories.
At one point when del Costello and I were talking, I mentioned Kathy Young, who had a big hit in 1961 with “A Thousand Stars,” a remake of the marvelous 1954 release by the Rivieras. Del Costello said she had been on one of the shows he produced and then talked at some length about how he and Young “became close. I mean, very close. I mean, we almost got married.”
Interesting.
It’s also interesting how students from his film class at the Institute of Art split sharply in their evaluations of his courses. Some said he was smart, entertaining and insightful. A smaller number said he struck them as a calculated self-promoter.
He was probably some of both, which hardly makes him unique. He made money, he had IRS troubles. He made big promises and kept some. When I asked him about the concert DVDs, he said, “I don’t know. I’m great at projects. My weak spot is finishing them.”
He suffered a stroke several years ago, and he said this brush with mortality had jump-started him into writing his memoirs. There’s no sign he completed them, which again doesn’t make him unique. Few of us, I suspect, cross every item off our to-do list before we check out.
Whatever his strong and shaky points, he was a guy who knew the music and cared about it. He knew that if you really wanted a Swallows reunion, you needed to get both lead singers, Eddie Rich and Junior Denby. He could explain why Ernie Lee Warren, lead singer of the Cardinals, didn’t want to perform if he weren’t sure the harmonies could be perfect. He could track the evolution of vocal group harmony from the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots to the Delta Rhythm Boys and the Orioles. He was frustrated that all of it got so little respect.
I still wish del Costello had finished those DVDs. I wish a lot of things. But sitting here looking at Little Richard, I’m okay with the hundred bucks.
