by Bob Stanley
After falling out with just about everyone he’d ever worked with, Meek set up his own RGM studio above a leather-goods shop at 301 Holloway Road, the main road north out of London. Vocals were recorded in the toilet, string sections stood on the stairs, and it should have been a joke. Instead, two of the best records he ever made appeared almost straight away: Mike Berry’s ‘Tribute to Buddy Holly’, and ‘Johnny Remember Me’, both in ’61. They were written by Reading-born Geoff Goddard, who shared Meek’s interest in the occult, and were garish and cinematic, bunching together the Wild West, plane crashes, war-comic heroes and Wuthering Heights heroines.
Dozens of RGM productions were released in quick succession, not always great, though they all shared the trademarks of speeded-up vocals, sound effects, angelic backing vocals, massed strings and a hint of clammy, illicit trysts. The classic RGM single was so sonically compressed it sounded like an orchestra had been squeezed into a wardrobe.
Meek was heavily inspired by another thread of the immediate post-rock ’n’ roll era, the instrumental, which had provided a rare safe haven for tougher sounds: Duane Eddy’s echo-drenched growling guitar (‘Rebel Rouser’, ‘Because They’re Young’, ‘Peter Gunn’), the Shadows’ idealised evocations of the foreign (‘Apache’, ‘FBI’, ‘Kon-Tiki’) and Johnny and the Hurricanes’ wasps’-nest-like organ (‘Red River Rock’, ‘Beatnik Fly’, ‘Rockin’ Goose’) had all regularly made the UK Top 20 from 1958 to 1962. The Outlaws, Saints, Tornados and Moontrekkers were Meek’s instrumental response, and the latter’s ‘Night of the Vampire’ – with creaking coffin, deranged-cat keyboard and a frighteningly realistic female scream5 – created a rare masterpiece on pop’s Carry On/Hammer House of Horror interface.
The exact difference between British and American modern pop can be found by comparing Meek’s and Spector’s productions. Meek sped things up, worked at a frenetic pace, as if it was the best way to keep warm in his cramped North London flat. Spector’s sound was panoramic, as big as Meek’s but warmer, more luxurious; it used the finest ingredients, the greatest singers and musicians from New York and California, while Meek’s seemed gaudy, straight out of Woolworths. Value for money – it’s the British disease. Meek could turn out three singles in a week, but Spector took time, expensive LA studio time, perfecting his sound. Songwriter Jeff Barry remembered working on Spector’s 1963 Christmas album as a physical and mental endurance test: ‘I stood there for days and days and days, just playing shakers.’
Both had traumatic childhoods, simultaneously bullied and cosseted by their families; both were convinced other people were out to steal their ideas (Meek apparently received a call from Spector, just the once, and slammed the receiver down so hard it shattered). Both were out to gain revenge on the world, were ungracious while at the top, and crashed and burned when the world turned and they fell from favour.
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The gulfs between age and race and between Britain and America had been bridged by rock ’n’ roll. There was another gulf to be bridged, but this didn’t really manifest itself until the early sixties. Commerce versus art: it was a fifties cliché that the arts were a fancy affair, highbrow for longhairs, worthy, important and a bit dull, and that the products of commerce were the obvious, stupid opposite. But a feeling was gathering that modern pop was suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, delivering something that art – as defined in the fifties – no longer understood. While there were plenty of wheeler-dealers trying to push their own Johnny Restivo or Vince Eager into teenage girls’ hearts, it was apparent to some commentators that the likes of Roy Orbison, Dion, Del Shannon, Joe Meek and Phil Spector were operating on a different level, one closer to Richard Hamilton than Cliff Richard.
‘I get a little angry when people say it’s bad music,’ Spector told Tom Wolfe during an interview for Esquire magazine. ‘This music has a spontaneity that doesn’t exist in any other kind of music, and it’s what is here now. It has limited chord changes, and people are always saying the words are banal and why doesn’t anybody write lyrics like Cole Porter any more, but we don’t have any presidents like Lincoln any more, either. You know? It’s pop blues. I feel it’s very American. It’s what people respond to today. It’s not just the kids. I hear cab drivers, everybody, listening to it.’
Spector condensed pop to romance and sex, crushes and break-ups, love and pride. For many people who bought his records, he gave the subject matter the backdrop it deserved; this was the stuff of life itself. The sound was all-consuming, left no room for anything else in your head, and tore at your heart with tympani and an exuberant rush of noise: it was labelled the Wall of Sound.6 In contrast to this barrage, the key to the directness of Spectorsound was lyrical simplicity. Take any random line from the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ – ‘I’ll make you happy, baby, just wait and see’ – and it’s a crush in a heartbeat. Spector’s best writers were Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, a couple from Brooklyn who also happened to be very much in love when they wrote the Crystals’ ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘Then He Kissed Me’, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ ‘Not Too Young to Get Married’ and Darlene Love’s ‘Wait Til My Bobby Gets Home’. And as Spector was very much in love with the Ronettes’ Veronica Bennett, he saved their very best songs – ‘Be My Baby’ (US no. 2, UK no. 4 ’63) and ‘Baby I Love You’ (US no. 24, UK no. 11 ’64) – so that he could hear the words come out of her mouth and into his ears.
Those Ronettes chart stats show that no matter how futuristic their sounds were, how big and progressive and damn near perfect, Meek and Spector, like so many others, staggered and faltered after the Beatles broke. Meek had a beat-era number one with the Honeycombs’ ‘Have I the Right’, a foot-stomping hormonal howl (‘Grrrrrr, come right back, I just can’t bear it’) that showed he could manufacture what he disparagingly called ‘matchbox music’ any time he wanted. Spector’s last dance was altogether more tormented. By late ’64 the Beatles and Motown were the now sounds, leaving even a single as lush and romantic and tearfully timeless as the Ronettes’ ‘Walking in the Rain’ stranded outside the Top 20. Suddenly his sound seemed too teenage. He turned to Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, New York’s most furrowed and thoughtful songwriting team, for something a little more mature. They delivered ‘You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’’.
There is a staggering force in its opening line: ‘You never close your eyes any more when I kiss your lips’ is a dreadful inversion of the whispered promise of ‘I Love How You Love Me’, the Paris Sisters hit Barry Mann had written and Spector had produced four years previously. It chronicles the imminent death of a love affair in such a deeply wounded way that it’s a blessed relief to know the song wasn’t autobiographical. Spector ‘borrowed’ blue-eyed soul boys the Righteous Brothers, who weren’t used to anything as slow and brooding. Spector arranged the session ‘like he was going to invade Moscow’, according to guitarist Barney Kessel. ‘Musically, it was terribly simple, but the way he’d recorded and miked it, they’d diffuse it so that you couldn’t pick out any one instrument.’ The Aquatones’ ‘You’, the spooked one-off hit from ’58 that predicted this sound, had been almost a sketch of a song; now this sound had mutated into a dam-busting thing of extra ordinary size and power. The vocals are angry, accusing, pleading; by the end all the flash and noise is reduced to one solitary bassline, before a final crescendo – ‘bring back that lovin’ feelin’’ – and a fade into depthless introspection. It was Spector’s masterpiece and made number one in both Britain (despite Cilla Black’s cover version climbing as high as number two) and America.
After the Honeycombs’ initial promise dissipated with a weak follow-up (‘Is It Because’, which barely charted), Joe Meek kept producing music at a prodigious rate but could hardly get a record released; his dogged independence was becoming a curse. Towards the end he was recording some of the most mentally damaged music to gain release on a major British label. Hear the eerie, empty winterscape of the Honeycombs’ ‘Eyes’ (1965) or the feedback squa
ll of the Syndicats’ ‘Crawdaddy Simone’ (1965) and the Buzz’s ‘You’re Holding Me Down’ (1966) to hear the true sound of paranoia and encroaching insanity. Also in ’66, Spector was crushed by the failure of Ike and Tina Turner’s titanic ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, which took lyrical naivety (teddy bears, puppy dogs, pies) to a new extreme, twinning it with the most ferociously sexual vocal he ever recorded. It reached number 3 in the UK but fell away after a few dismal weeks in the bottom quarter of the Billboard Hot Hundred. Spent, he retired at twenty-five. Despite working in later years with the solo Beatles, the Ramones, even Celine Dion, he never recovered that march-on-Moscow bravado, and wallowed in his eccentricities for decades before his fondness for firearms ended with the death of an actress called Lana Clarkson.
Meek’s twilight was far briefer; since shooting his landlady and then himself in 1967, his legacy has lived on in recording studios around the world via the equipment named after him, effects boxes he had invented and kept secret some four decades earlier. Meek and Spector were the first to really understand and engineer the power of the 45, the first to forge a new pop music from the white heat of technology. Unlike almost all of their contemporaries, they realised that great pop is, at its heart, about great-sounding records. Meek and Spector weren’t trying to deal with reality, they were trying to improve on it.
1 The title was taken from an inscription on Spector’s father’s tombstone, ‘To know him was to love him’.
2 The most extreme 1960 example came from the pen of Burt Bacharach: Paul Hampton narrates the astonishing ‘Two Hour Honeymoon’, which opens with screeching tyres and ends with an ungodly atonal burst of brass. Death discs survived the beat boom: two of the biggest hits – Twinkle’s ‘Terry’ (UK no. 4) and the Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader of the Pack’ (US no. 1, UK no. 11) – came at the end of ’64, while the Buoys’ cannibal drama ‘Timothy’ (US no. 17) was a hit as late as 1971. Tom Jones’s ‘Delilah’ (US no. 15, UK no. 2 ’68), Tony Christie’s ‘I Did What I Did for Maria’ (UK no. 2 ’71) and R. Dean Taylor’s ‘Indiana Wants Me’ (US no. 5 ’70, UK no. 2 ’71) put a new twist on the genre, romanticising murder through wounded male pride.
3 Leyton played a pop star called Johnny St Cyr in an episode of department-store soap Harpers West One. It was a neat twist that Meek’s studio, where they rush-recorded a song for the fictional St Cyr, was next door to a real furniture shop called Harpers of Holloway. The shop’s name is still just about visible on the wall.
4 He could be described as the first record producer in the world. In the pre-rock era, there had been two significant names who could challenge this: Les Paul, through his wild guitar effects and close-miked vocals on his duets with Mary Ford, and Mitch Miller, who had double-tracked Patti Page and backed Rosemary Clooney with a distorted harpsichord. But Meek was the first to manipulate every element of the track, imagining the record as a complete production.
5 The woman’s scream at the end of ‘Night of the Vampire’ was actually Meek’s voice, possibly sped up, possibly not.
6 The term ‘wall of sound’ had first appeared in an 1884 New York Times piece describing Richard Wagner’s redesigned Nibelungen Theater in Bayreuth in Germany, which – for the first time – placed the orchestra in a pit, creating an invisible ‘wall of sound’. Closer to the Spector era, it had also been used to describe Stan Kenton’s fifties band.
11
THE TROUBLE WITH BOYS: THE BRILL BUILDING AND GIRL GROUPS
In 1962 the American record industry collected $161 million from the 210 million singles it sold. The major labels like Columbia and Mercury – after initially leaving rock ’n’ roll to small independents like Sun – were now employing teenage A&R staff, having finally figured that no one understood the kids better than the kids themselves. Twenty-nine-year-old Don Kirshner, his Aldon publishing company and his Dimension record label were at the heart of this boom. Kirshner’s nickname was ‘the man with the golden ears’. He used a team of two dozen songwriters – who included Carole King, Barry Mann and Neil Sedaka, and none of whom were over twenty-five – working in a warren of cubicles, fitted with nothing more than a desk and a piano, in a nondescript building at 1650 Broadway. They redefined modern pop by taking rock ’n’ roll uptown – they added Latin-influenced percussion, and string arrangements, and created little symphonies for the kids. Effortlessly, and on an industrial scale, they could turn out a song of the calibre of ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, ‘Up on the Roof’, ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’, ‘Be My Baby’, ‘Breaking Up Is Hard to Do’ or ‘The Locomotion’ every week. Though the sounds emanated from several buildings in close proximity, the one most associated with this writer/production set-up was the Brill Building – after all, it had a catchier name than 1650 Broadway, and it soon became shorthand for the sound of early-sixties New York.
Broadway, the Great White Way, was already the heart of the entertainment industry when the original songwriting hothouse – the Brill Building, at 1619 – was built in 1931. It was a handsome art-deco creation of white brick and bronze, named after a company of haberdashers who owned the ground floor. Above them, on the first floor, had been the Paradise nightclub; the upper floors housed publishers,1 agents, promoters, pluggers – the seamier end of showbiz. These interdependent businesses would meet, and they would sell songs, cut deals, make and break records in a restaurant called the Turf at the base of the building. The Turf was fitted with twenty phone booths for industry types working their way up, not yet successful enough to afford their own space, who had to make do with a standing-room-only office.
By 1962 the Brill Building housed 165 different music companies. Those with less money to splash on looking flash, like Don Kirshner, settled for cheaper accommodation on the stretch between 49th and 53rd Streets: the Brill Building sound also emanated from 1674, 1697 and Aldon’s home at 1650. Writer Toni Wine (‘A Groovy Kind of Love’, ‘Black Pearl’, ‘Knock Three Times’) was just fourteen when she first started working for Aldon: ‘You’d walk in and there was just music in every elevator, in the lobby, everywhere you walked.’
The Brill Building and its neighbours had a quick-witted jangle – in the heart of the city they could adapt to and negotiate New York’s multicultural street life. What also gave these buildings their special flavour, their feel for speed and a rapid turnover of hit songs, was what economists would call vertical integration. The old pre-rock school, the ASCAP-affiliated writers, had relied on sheet music to make a living, but the modern pop generation, plenty of whom couldn’t read music, made the most of Broadway’s all-inclusive set-up to deliver fast product: you could write a song, find a publisher to buy it, someone to arrange it and musicians to cut it (Allegro Studios were in the basement of 1650) for a total of around $60. The whole process could be completed in a day. Then you took your acetate to a record company and, if you’d done a good job, they signed it up. It was a division of labour, and specialisation for optimum impact. A lot of chaff was created, but no one has yet come up with a better, more reliable way of creating classic modern pop. In the little more than half a decade that made up the Brill Building era, the artists – that is, the writers, producers and arrangers – could write freely about the pains and pressures of growing up without the need to publicly front the agonies and ecstasies of their music.
Hits came out of the Brill Building through sheer hard work: writing to deadlines, rewriting, rearranging, sweat and toil. Unlike rock ’n’ roll’s Southern wildmen, Brill Building staffers weren’t known for their carnal threat, heavy boozing or opulent jewellery. They went to the office, wore ties, wrote hits. To early rock ’n’ roll aesthetes like Nik Cohn this was tantamount to cheating – he snarkily labelled it ‘highschool’. The manufacturing of this music – which was no different from the creation of a standard like ‘It Never Entered My Mind’ (written by Rodgers and Hart, arranged by Nelson Riddle, sung by Frank Sinatra) – also added to the snob feeling among students and beatniks, which led them to ignore modern p
op entirely in the early sixties and lean instead towards Dixieland (or ‘trad’) jazz in Britain and folk in America. Bob Dylan, in one of his more spiteful and less acute moments, ridiculed Brill Building songs as ‘You love me, I love you, ooby dooby doo’.
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were the godfathers of this new, post-rock ’n’ roll writer/producer pop2 and their best songs alone – ribald, self-produced with comic theatricality – were a solid defence against Dylan’s low blows. Leiber and Stoller were east-coast Jewish wise guys with a taste for blues and boogie woogie who had met when both of their families relocated to California in the late forties. They were also pop snobs of the highest order,3 finding the music of their forebears and contemporary white America to be sappy and sexless. Early on they had written lurid jump-blues pieces with titles like ‘Fast Women and Sloe Gin’, but broke through with Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’, an R&B number one in 1952. They initially frowned on rock ’n’ roll, but weren’t complaining when ‘Hound Dog’ was covered by Elvis in ’56 and made them wealthy. They quickly relocated to the heart of the new music, New York, and got themselves an office in the Brill Building in 1957. Once inside, they found a regular route into the Top 10 via a vocal group called the Coasters. Carl Gardner’s perpetually pop-eyed lead vocals (‘Take out the papers and the trash, or you don’t get no spending cash!’) were countered by the booming, shrugging bass of Bobby Nunn (‘Why’s everybody always picking on me?’) on ‘Searchin’’ (US no. 3, UK no. 30 ’57), ‘Yakety Yak’ (US no. 1, UK no. 12 ’58), ‘Charlie Brown’ (US no. 2, UK no. 6 ’59) and ‘Poison Ivy’ (US no. 7, UK no. 15 ’59): each condensed teen-culture mainstays (nagging parents, elusive girls, class clowns) into a two-minute playlet, complete with breakneck rhythm and yakety sax. Leiber and Stoller also gave a first break to a young displaced west-coaster called Phil Spector. They let him work with them on former Drifter Ben E. King’s first solo single, ‘Spanish Harlem’ (US no. 10 ’60), an ode to a rose growing up through the cracks in a New York sidewalk.