Music Appreciation: The History of Rock Chapter 8 The Brill Building

The Brill Building is located at 1619 Broadway in the borough of Manhattan, in the heart of New York’s music district. Since the 1950’s, it’s name has been synonymous with an approach to rock songwriting that changed the course of music.

The fame of the Brill Building is mainly due to the success of Aldon Music, a music publishing firm actually located across the street from the Brill Building. Aldon Music was founded by Al Nevins and Don Kirshner.

Nevins had been a guitar player with the group Three Suns, while Kirshner had experience in song writing, management, publishing, and song plugging (promotion). Rock & Roll had gained popularity for several years, and audience taste was possible to identify and define. The established music industry was looking for a way to manipulate Rock & Roll into the old rules that existed.

Nevins and Kirshner looked for a way to bridge the gap between the “sophisticated cocktail music” of Tin Pan Alley and the “rude street noise” of Rock & Roll. They were responding to the overwhelming demand for songs by the thousands of young groups now clogging the studios. Most of these performers were recording old standards or thoroughly inadequate original material, because it was rare in those days to find artists who could write decent material of their own.

Kirshner’s goal was to supply songs of the highest standards of professionalism to this new market, while maintaining an appeal to the teenage audiences. Aldon Music’s first team of young writers included: Gerry Goffin Carole King Barry Mann Cynthia Weil Bobby Darin Neil Diamond Howard Greenfield Neil Sedaka

Aldon’s major clients during their early years included Columbia, Atlantic, RCA, and ABC. All of these required songs of high quality and in great quantity.

There was a common quality among Aldon Music writers that was dubbed the “Brill Building Sound”. What the writers had in common was a genuine empathy with teenagers. They shared their values, interests, emotional needs, and slang. What made the Aldon writers different was their professionalism and respect for the traditions of Tin Pan Alley pop songwriting.

Tin Pan Alley thrived in the 30s and into the 40s with artists like Cole Porter, George & Ira Gershwin, and Rodgers & Hart. Porter’s writing style reflected a cynical sophistication. The Gershwins and Rodgers & Hart had a more abstract quality that was far removed form the realities of daily life.

Anything Goes https://youtu.be/r7NJ9ylAhos Someone to Watch Over Me https://youtu.be/gDhF-PsDuCw I’ll Take Manhattan https://youtu.be/NPIgQdOoEV0

When writing songs for the teenagers of the 1950s, it was necessary for images to be simple, believable, and immediate. The element of fantasy had to be melodramatically overblown. The standard “teen idol” approach from the past was to find singers with faces that could be promoted, then supply them with whatever songs were around, usually those written by the leader of the studio orchestra. As long as the song mentioned high school, they figured it would sell. The Brill Building writers turned that system around. They tried to understand what the kids wanted and why. They knew that any singer could be promoted with a strong song, so they concentrated on writing songs that would be hits because of their quality.

The Brill Building accounted for most of the best rock music between 1959 and 1964. New Orleans and Detroit saw some small pockets of creativity, but New York ruled supreme.

The majority of Brill Building songs were composed by three teams: Sedaka-Greenfield, Goffin-King, and Mann-Weil The first highly successful team was Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield, two classmates from Brooklyn’s Lincoln High School.

They had written songs previously, but it wasn’t until Kirshner gave Sedaka a contract with RCA Records that the hits started flowing. From 1958-1963, Sedaka and Greenfield wrote 17 hit songs. Sedaka’s style when writing with Greenfield was influenced by Cole Porter and was described as “detached, witty, and technically polished”.

As if it were a literary exercise, Greenfield’s lyrics often began with metaphor, which he extended in each verse. From ordinary adolescent schmaltz, he used images of angels, devils, and stairways to heaven…turning them into well constructed fantasies. Sedaka’s favorite song of his own writings was “Calendar Girl”, whose lyrics took his girl through an entire year, citing a new attribute each month, complete with clever clichés and new formulations. https://youtu.be/FpdY97Tt_iE

This type of song was, and always will be, popular with a wide range of people. It was especially attractive to the young, romantically minded ones, which was the audience that the Brill Building was cultivating.

The premier performer of Aldon Music was Carole King, who grew up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood as Sedaka and Greenfield. She made a few solo records in the 50s,but it was when she teamed with Gerry Goffin that she emerged as a composer. She was so successful as a writer that it pushed her own singing into the background for more than a decade.

In the space of five years, King wrote more than a hundred substantial singles, and a hundred more that were not quite as strong. The team of Goffin and King was the most prolific and popular of the era. King composed melodies much like Sedaka did, under constant pressure to turn out a continual stream of hits.

Goffin dealt with teen problems and situations in a mature and emotionally believable manner. His lyrics were literate but not as literary as Greenfield’s. Here are the lyrics to “Up On The Roof” from 1962: When this old world starts getting me down And people are just too much for me to take I climb way up to the top of the stairs And all my cares just drift right into space… From the internal rhyming of “Stairs” and “cares” to the image of ascending from the street to the stars by way of an apartment staircase, it is first-rate, sophisticated writing. https://youtu.be/puM1k-S86nE

Goffin was able to combine fantasy and realism successfully on “Halfway to Paradise”, “Hey Girl”, and the all –time classic of Goffin/King “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” The latter was an astonishingly honest (for 1960) restatement of the old “will you respect me in the morning” theme. https://youtu.be/cbxxkwBQk_o (Shirelles) https://youtu.be/KLLYOLKvU9U (Carole King)

Of course, Goffin and King wrote a lot of songs that were not popular and are probably best forgotten. It was expected, given the number of songs being written, that some would be losers. The surprising thing was how many of the songs were truly great. In it’s peak year, Aldon Music put 200 songs on the charts, mostly written by Goffin/King or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil… the third successful team of ace songwriters.

Barry Mann recalls those days at the Brill Building as being “insane” Barry Mann recalls those days at the Brill Building as being “insane”. He remembers that he and Weil would be “in a tiny cubicle the size of a closet with a piano and a chair; no window or anything”. They went in every morning and wrote songs all day. In the next cubicle was another team of writers. Sometimes you couldn’t tell who was playing what when all the pianos were going simultaneously. Mann says that “Don Kirshner was like a father figure to us all. We wanted him to be pleased. The competition and the pressure brought out the best in us.”

Often, the writers had no idea where their songs would end up Often, the writers had no idea where their songs would end up. They cut demo records, cheap versions utilizing only piano or maybe a small studio band, designed to give the artist some idea of the intended arrangement. Some demos, particularly those by Carole King, were so well conceived that they were copied note-for-note. Occasionally, they were released as recorded, as were a couple of early Tony Orlando songs. Only Goffin and King entered the studio to produce a hit version of one of their songs.

Barry Mann had a hit song, but preferred to stay behind the scenes as a writer. The songs he wrote with Cynthia Weil reflected their classical music training and sense of structure. They added elements of humor, parody, social commentary, and raw emotion to their music. “Who Put the Bomp?” https://youtu.be/lXmsLe8t_gg

Their songs “Uptown” https://youtu. be/Ymo__5BW8w0 Their songs “Uptown” https://youtu.be/Ymo__5BW8w0?list=PLTmHdI1c2XFinFZDYSEIYbqL6cnxcP0oM and “Only in America” https://youtu.be/O_1RNVexxjU?list=PLTmHdI1c2XFinFZDYSEIYbqL6cnxcP0oM were viewed as protest songs. Many of their other hits reflected the “hip lifestyle circle” they moved in socially.

They had an instinct for topical subject matter, often bordering on the controversial, shown in their 1966 song “Kicks” about drug abuse. https://youtu.be/IP8G4clUJBY?list=PLTmHdI1c2XFinFZDYSEIYbqL6cnxcP0oM

1962 and 1963 were the golden years for Aldon Music 1962 and 1963 were the golden years for Aldon Music. Kirshner launched his own label, Dimension, with Goffin and King doing most of the writing. After less than a year, Dimension was sold to Screen Gems, along with the rest of Aldon Music. Kirshner became the head of the powerful Screen Gems music division, supervising their labels and adding Aldon’s East Coast writers to the West Coast writers already in place with Lou Adler of Screen Gems.

Writers David Gates, Harry Nillson, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart joined the old Aldon writing team. The culmination of the merger was the creation of the Monkees in 1966, with Kirshner as their musical supervisor. This “made for TV” group/franchise saw remarkable success.

New York continued to enjoy strong music writing, thanks in large part to Burt Bacharach and Hal David, considered to be the most polished of the writing teams. Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman wrote teen pop in a more bluesy, soulful style and enjoyed moderate success, although less recognized than Bacharach/David. At this point, Atlantic Records became the major producer for Brill Building music. The company had many artists capable of handling the sophisticated material, and Atlantic prided itself on having the best musicians.

Outside of the Aldon Music circles, a song writing duo, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, represented the greatest threat to Aldon’s prominence. Their success in the 50s with Elvis Presley and the Coasters was a marriage of rhythm and blues and pop music. They started out in Los Angeles with a hit song for Willie Mae Thornton entitled “Hound Dog”. (later a hit for Elvis)

After signing a group called the Robins and recording them on the Spark label, Leiber and Stoller changed the group’s name to the Coasters. They moved to New York and wrote a series of hits for the group.

They composed songs for two Elvis Presley movies “Jailhouse Rock” and “King Creole”. Soon after, they wrote for another successful group, the Drifters. Although they were both white, Leiber and Stoller could write in an utterly convincing rhythm & blues style and could switch from the flippant jive of “Charlie Brown” https://youtu.be/AbBr2bgAbcM to the moving soulfulness of “Spanish Harlem”. https://youtu.be/OGd6CdtOqEE

The writers were credited with introducing string instruments into rhythm & blues records. Strings were first used in the song “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters in 1959. https://youtu.be/i3HXy9mGPpI

Leiber and Stoller first conceived the notion of enhancing the emotional power of black music through elaborate production. This introduced the concept of soul music as an alternative as doo-wop started to lose popularity.

Leiber and Stoller brought a new young producer to New York Leiber and Stoller brought a new young producer to New York. His name was Phil Spector. Spector studied production and worked on records by the Drifters and Ben E. King. He started his own label “Phillies”, which became a major outlet for Brill Building music.

Leiber and Stoller also started their own labels, first with Daisy, and later with Red Bird.

During this time period, unprecedented change was happening in this small New York area. The distinctions between songwriter, producer, and singer blurred into irrelevance. The Brill Building writers had all been singers, and some like Goffin and King had proven themselves capable in the studio as well. Often, they could outperform the professionals who had been trying to duplicate the quality of their demo recordings.

Leiber, Stoller, and Spector realized that a more natural creativity could take place if the people who owned the record company were the same ones who wrote, produced, and sang the songs. The ability to control the record from its inception to its release, with total involvement in production, arrangements, recording, and promotion allowed these people to operate at a new level of creativity.

Originally, Leiber and Stoller’s Red Bird records was devoted to Girl Groups. They used the writing team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich (husband and wife). In place of the formalism and textbook perfection of other writers, Barry and Greenwich wrote music with rough edges and heavy doses of raw teenage poetry. They signed with Trio Music, another Leiber and Stoller company.

Red Bird Records produced hits for the Dixie Cups, the Jelly Beans, Andy Kim, and the Butterflys. They also had success with a series of “teen melodramas” for a group called the Shangri-Las. https://youtu.be/Q8UKf65NOzM There were no stairways to heaven or metaphors in the songs with these groups, rather, nonsense phrases like “Doo-Wah-Diddy-Diddy” or “Da-Doo-Ron-Ron”. Lyrics were secondary to the sound, feel, and texture of the music. This gave teenagers the ability to understand the emotion or state of mind in the songs because he or she had lived it themselves.

When Red Bird was sold, Barry and Greenwich left and partnered with a discovery of theirs named Neil Diamond, who had been cutting lots of quality demos. Bert Berns founded Bang Records, having already had hit songs with “Twist and Shout” and “Hang on Sloopy”. As girl groups faded out of style and teen idols disappeared, there was no longer a huge market for Brill Building songs. Some of their older songs continued to bring in royalties through newly recorded hit versions of the old songs.

The Brill Building era faded as artists who once shaped it outgrew the limitations of the assembly-line approach to creating music. Ultimately, Goffin and King broke up as a writing team. Carole began working with underground groups and then became a successful singer-songwriter. She had a mega-hit album in the 70s entitled “Tapestry”. It was one of the best selling albums of all time.

During its heyday, the Brill Building had brought a new professionalism and maturity to rock and roll. When the Beatles arrived in New York for their first visit, they made it a point to meet Goffin and King. They counted them as their songwriting idols. The Brill Building almost single-handedly brought production techniques for rock into the modern era. They brought an intelligent romanticism to the music, and in the process gave us several hundred of the best songs in the history of rock.