Florida music history just got a lot more colorful, thanks to Bill DeYoung’s biography “Phil Gernhard, Record Man.”
Never heard of Gernhard?
Join the club.
What you have heard is the remarkable range of pop songs, novelty records and country stars that the Sarasota man helped produce and promote during a one-of-a-kind music career.
He started with “Stay,” a 1960 doo-wop hit with a soaring falsetto.
So won’t you stay-ay-ay-ay, just a little bit longer …
Next came “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” a novelty song by an Ocala band.
Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more …
Then there was Lobo, an easy-listening star of the ‘70s. He sang about an unlikely trio on a cross-country road trip.
Me and you and a dog named Boo …
Gernhard had an ear for popular music. He became a record man, bringing songs and singers together in the studio. He followed his dream from St. Petersburg to Los Angeles and then Nashville, where he helped launch the country careers of Tim McGraw and Rodney Atkins.
All of his hits, though, couldn’t buy happiness.
Gernhard was married four times, made his share of shady deals and went through decades of drug and alcohol abuse. He was admired and despised, sometimes by the same people. He finally shot himself in 2008.
Soon after, there was a less-than-sentimental story in Nashville Scene, an alternative news weekly: “Number One With a Bullet: The wonderful, terrible life of Phil Gernhard, hit maker.”
DeYoung, a Florida music journalist, returned to that story nearly a decade later. He had grown up in St. Pete, so he was curious about Gernhard.
“I always knew who he was,” DeYoung said. “I was the kind of kid who read the labels on records.”
It didn’t take much research to discover that Gernhard was not a very nice guy. But he was a successful record executive. He did groom a lot of different artists in a lot of different genres.
“When you put them all together, it’s epic,” DeYoung said. “It’s one guy who did all this."
While reading “Record Man,” music fans might want to open a YouTube link so they can listen to old songs as they read about how they became hits.
The best part of the book is the beginning.
Fleeing his father
Less than a year before his death, Gernhard called Betty Vernon, a junior high school sweetheart from Sarasota.
He was sad. He was lonely. He was dying of cancer.
And he wanted to leave her his estate.
Vernon was stunned. This was out of the blue. Crazy.
Yet, they became friends again. They talked about the old days. She remembered the skinny red-headed boy who lived across the street from Jungle Gardens.
For years, Gernhard told a favorite story of paying 50 cents to see Elvis Presley perform at the Florida Theatre in Sarasota. He said it changed his life. Rock 'n' roll offered romance and escape.
DeYoung writes that Phil and his sister Judy had a tortured relationship with their father, Boyd Gernhard, a Sarasota County commissioner. He was an alcoholic, domineering and abusive.
After graduating from Sarasota High School in 1958, Phil fled to the University of South Carolina.
Soon, he was skipping class to book concerts and promote bands.
At the age of 19, he helped produce “Stay,” a song by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs. The recording was rough, but it featured a sky-high falsetto that people remember half a century later.
Novelties and legends
Gernhard returned to Florida, opened an office in St. Petersburg and looked for his next hit.
In 1966, he re-wrote one novelty song to create another — “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.” The Royal Guardsmen? They were a Florida band from Ocala. They took their name from a Vox guitar amplifier.
Gernhard also promoted concerts at Curtis Hixon Hall, a 7,000-seat auditorium in Tampa that was demolished in 1993. He booked legends such as Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.
When Janis Joplin was arrested for shouting obscenities at a police officer, Gernhard was the one who bailed her out of the Hillsborough County Jail.
After discovering Lobo, Gernhard turned to Jim Stafford, a guitar-playing comedian from Winter Haven. His near-novelty hits included “Spiders and Snakes” and “My Girl Bill.”
Stafford used to perform at the Elbow Room on St. Armands Circle. His one-man road crew was a Florida friend who later became a watermelon-smashing comedian known as Gallagher.
Producing Stafford’s television specials helped draw Gernhard to Los Angeles.
Years later, Gernhard would tell Vernon that the music business was insane. Money, drugs, corruption. He got married and divorced, married and divorced.
In 1988, a 47-year-old Gernhard did an interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The headline was “Music Man.” He said L.A. life was “crazy,” but offered a different plan for his future.
He wanted to go back to school and get a Ph.D. in psychology, so he could spend his old age teaching and doing research.
Nashville sounds and sadness
Instead, Gernhard followed Curb Records to Nashville, where it became a country label.
He no longer produced records, but he still had a knack for picking hits and promoting artists. Tim McGraw was one. Ten years later, there was Rodney Atkins.
The head of the record company was one of Gernhard's admirers.
“Phil was a producer, a publisher, a promoter — a total record man,” Mike Curb told DeYoung. “Maybe I’ve met five in my lifetime. He was one of them.”
Yet the Nashville years make for bleak reading in DeYoung's book.
Gernhard was a lonely alcoholic and drug addict. His sister had to talk him into attending his mother’s funeral. He refused to go to Florida when his father died.
His final marriage was to a 28-year-old Swedish woman he met on a video shoot. She turned out to be a professional escort who continued to work after they were married.
Gernhard filed for divorce, but never completed the process. He never managed to leave his estate to Vernon back in Florida.
Still, they talked on the phone for hours. It seemed to make him feel better. Friends thought he might have found some peace.
Until he shot himself at home in Nashville.
Gernhard’s body was discovered on Feb. 22, 2008. Just days before, he had celebrated a fourth No. 1 hit for Atkins.
He was a record man to the end.