by Bob Stanley
It was their work for the Drifters – a vocal group of ever shifting membership – which would inspire younger New York’s cub writers and lay the foundations for what became the sound of the Brill Building. Leiber and Stoller had already written the Drifters a slew of excellent, raucous R&B hits in the late fifties (‘Fools Fall in Love’, ‘Ruby Baby’, ‘Drip Drop’) before they dramatically broke new ground with their production of ‘There Goes My Baby’, a US number two in 1959, the first R&B record to incorporate strings. Even now, it sounds like two different records playing at the same time, different urban strains rubbing up against each other. Ben E. King’s lead vocal is wayward, piercingly lonely. A booming Brazilian baion beat4 guides him through this uncharted landscape. Undeniably weird, always one step from chaos, it nevertheless opened up a new world of pop possibilities: here, for one thing, are the roots of sweet soul. In the wake of ‘There Goes My Baby’ a blend of Latin rhythms, orchestral sweetness and tenement passions, very cosmopolitan and very New York, began to fill the void caused by rock ’n’ roll’s demise.
Modern pop is essentially urban, and city living is a matter of constant shifting of context, between neighbourhoods and between roles. Two or more seemingly incompatible styles working at once is the existential reality of urban life. The term ‘authenticity’, one which causes a constant tension throughout the story of modern pop, was popularised by existentialism, the du jour beatnik/student philosophy of the early sixties. Beatniks, jazz fans and readers of Kierkegaard and Sartre may have heard ‘There Goes My Baby’ in the context of a TV show like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and dismissed it as inauthentic, emotionally infantile, but right here was a blend of different musics and neighbourhoods (Spanish Harlem, Long Island, the Bronx, Broadway) that related to shape-shifting street life much more closely than the venerated, un diluted directness of Pete Seeger’s folk or Chris Barber’s jazz.
Modern pop thrives on curious combinations. The same year as ‘There Goes My Baby’ was released, the unlikely pairing of a polio-stricken blues shouter from Williamsburg called Doc Pomus and lean, handsome New York Conservatory student Mort Shuman struck gold from within the Brill Building. As a singer, Pomus had been on the club scene for years, a hero to Leiber and Stoller, but he was broke and desperate when, in 1959, he teamed up with the pop-savvy Shuman, eleven years his junior. They clicked quickly, turning out two atmospheric doo-wop hits in the same week – the Mystics’ ‘Hushabye’ (a US number twenty in ’59, all heaven and tears and goodnight kisses, later covered with spirit by the Beach Boys) and Dion and the Belmonts’ ‘Teenager in Love’. With this hit (a number five in the US, and a number two in the UK for Marty Wilde), Pomus began to assimilate his love of the blues into the Brill Building sound. His previous most noted song had been a lived-in, helpless number for Ray Charles called ‘Lonely Avenue’. Now, with the boy Shuman at his side, Pomus felt twenty years younger, and confident of channelling adolescent confusion into hit songs: ‘One day I feel so happy, next day I feel so sad … Each night I ask the stars up above, why must I be a teenager in love?’
They followed it with something better still, another orchestrated landmark 45 for the Drifters. ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’, a US number one and UK number two, was a love song from Doc Pomus to his young bride Willi, the bittersweet atmosphere emanating from the fact that, watching her dance with his crutches at his side, he would never be able to join her.
Mort Shuman’s youth lent a notable innocence to the Brill sound that the older Leiber and Stoller were too streetwise and cynical to pull off. A trio of young couples who occupied 1650’s cubicles at the turn of the sixties would refine and define the style further still.
An introvert chemistry student with sad eyes, Gerry Goffin grew up in the Jamaica district of Brooklyn with the dream of writing a musical. At Queens College in 1958 he had met Carole King – born Carole Klein, ‘a musician who wrote bad lyrics’ – who instantly suggested they write a song together. She’d heard a rumour that R&B duo Mickey and Kitty were looking for something new, so they got to work: within a week the couple were dating, and within a month Mickey and Kitty’s ‘The Kid Brother’ was the first (if far from the greatest) 45 to bear the Goffin/King writing credit.
King was friends with a talented, conceited classical student at Queens called Neil Sedaka. He had a publishing deal with Aldon, and took King to 1650 Broadway, where, impressed by her single ‘Oh Neil’ (a rather sarcastic retort to Sedaka’s hit ‘Oh Carol’), Don Kirshner signed her and Goffin. Soon the urbane, painfully cool Barry Mann, the socially conscious actress/dancer Cynthia Weil, bubbly Ellie Greenwich and cowboy-hat-wearing Jeff Barry all signed up to Aldon. Just as quickly, they paired off and married: Goffin/King, Mann/Weil and Greenwich/Barry then set about dominating the American and British charts.
Although they looked up to Leiber/Stoller and Pomus/Shuman, the new teams’ spirit was closer to Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and the Broadway tradition than it was to R&B acts like Ray Charles or Big Mama Thornton. Yet they had spent their teens soaking up Alan Freed, the Orioles, the new sounds of New York. What they wanted from their music was to convey their own experiences of the big city, how it felt to be young and in love, and to be alive in a time of American affluence and influence.
Working on a production line, the Brill Building/1650 teams could turn out real pulp. A TV star called James Darren was the beneficiary of some of Goffin and King’s worst songs, including ‘Goodbye Cruel World’ (US no. 3, UK no. 28 ’61), which struggles like a tethered elephant behind a circus-organ motif. They were most effective when regularly working with hungrier, less cleanly professional singers, ones around whom they could create beautiful constructions, brimming with lust, and focusing on that most mythical source material of modern pop, the Boy. Concurrent with the youth takeover of the Brill Building was the rise of the girl group.
Connie Francis and Brenda Lee had made records that wouldn’t scare your parents; the girl groups of the early sixties didn’t even consider what adults might think. They made records about and for a complete teenage world. The Shirelles from Passaic, New Jersey, were first on the scene in late 1960 with Goffin and King’s first hit, ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3). In 1958 Addie, Doris, Shirley and Beverley had been heard singing ‘I Met Him on a Sunday’ by a Passaic High classmate called Mary Jane Greenberg; she told her mother, Florence, who just happened to run Scepter Records, and they were quickly signed up. The bravery of ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, with its post-virginal lyric, was something new, and the Shirelles were soon followed by interchangeable acts of girls who had met in high school and were often pictured in their prom dresses. Often, they were looking not for a long-term music career, or a way of making it to Hollywood, but simply for something fun to do for a couple of years before they got married and had kids. This gave their singing and their records a sense of spontaneity and freshness: ‘Goodbye Cruel World’ may not get much airplay these days, but the Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me’ certainly does.
Some girl groups were named, with great modernity, after the man-made fibres (Orlons, Rayons) which were putting Lancashire’s cotton mills out of business. Others (Angels, Crystals, Kittens, Sweet Things, Fawns) were decidedly feminine, while others thought of variations on the Bobbettes and Chantels, two fifties girl groups who only managed one sizeable hit each (‘Mr Lee’ and ‘Maybe’ respectively) but whose influence was immense on dozens of sixties girl groups: Ronettes, Shirelles, Jaynetts, Darnells, Parlettes, Bluebelles, Darlettes, Percells. Their anonymity now seems quite shocking: in 1963 Record Mirror’s Norman Jopling wrote an appreciation of the Shirelles, who by this point had scored sixteen Hot Hundred hits, and said ‘information on the group is very slight. Only four pictures have ever been seen in this country.’
The prime influence on the girl-group vocal sound had been the non-distaff, ill-fated Frankie Lymon: almost without exception, girl groups cited ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’ as the first song
they harmonised. Veronica Bennett of the Ronettes even got to go on a date with Frankie, a messy business which ended with him being physically thrown from her mum’s sofa.
As the Beatles dominated the British charts in 1963, the girl-group sound peaked in the States: fifty-one per cent of the year’s Top 20 hits were made up of female-vocal or mixed-vocal records, the majority of which were Brill Building songs, and the majority of these came from the offices of Don Kirshner’s Aldon Music.
Though he wasn’t yet thirty, Don Kirshner was a father figure to his writers, and an editor. ‘I can take someone else’s material and see what was wrong with it, rewrite it, fix up the story line,’ he said in 1963. ‘The material is the most important thing. More important than the artist is the song – the material and the proper interpretation. People buy feels, ideas, sounds.’
The archetypal Brill Building sound was Mann and Weil’s ‘On Broadway’, originally recorded by the Cookies in ’62 but buffed up and made into a classic with help from Leiber and Stoller as a 1963 Drifters single. Mann and Weil specialised in urban squalor and class struggles, first showing their hand with the Crystals’ racially conscious ‘Uptown’ (US no. 13) in ’62 and peaking with ‘We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place’ (UK no. 2, US no. 13 ’65), Bronx grit transferred to the sooty desolation of County Durham by Eric Burdon and the Animals.5 With ‘On Broadway’, Mann and Weil captured New York City in a bottle. The singer walks alone, shuffling, in spite of the bustle and speed all around him. There are mariachi horns, Dragnet police sirens, ‘magic in the air’ and a rhythm that could be a team of workmen cracking open concrete in the sticky summer heat.
The strings climb note by note at the end, like a camera pulling back to reveal the vastness of the city, mocking the singer’s dreams, making them seem less and less attainable: ‘the glitter rubs right off, and you’re nowhere’. It could be the story of any of the countless writers whose names crop up on the credits of the lesser, non-hit Brill Building 45s6 – Kornfeld, Gluck, Hunter, Powers; history does not record their attempts to survive Beatlemania, let alone their Laurel Canyon solo albums. In spite of Don Kirshner’s paternalism, it was ‘On Broadway’’s implied sense of imminent failure that drove on the star writers. ‘All we did was write songs,’ Barry Mann said later. ‘All we wanted to do was have hits. It had nothing to do with money, it just had to do with the drive we had. We were always trying to please Daddy, Donnie Kirshner. The word “happy” was never really part of our thinking.’
The music’s creators could only appreciate their achievements years later. The hothouse environment, then as now, meant you were only as hot as your current chart position.7 Even now, Carole King is disinclined to look at the Brill Building era with great fondness, preferring to concentrate on the slow-working balm of her seventies singer-songwriter work.
Which is a shame, because Goffin and King were the best of the lot, the most tortured (the Crystals’ ‘No One Ever Tells You’), the most deeply in love (the Cookies’ ‘I Never Dreamed’), the most sensual (Aretha Franklin’s ‘Natural Woman’). Goffin was moody, insecure, obsessed with his perceived inauthenticity: ‘When I write, I don’t consciously try to appeal to the kids, but I try not to exclude them. If the lyrics are too clever without having any soul, then they make a song sound insincere and phony and the kids recognize it right away.’ They picked up on stories directly from their whistling babysitter, ‘Little’ Eva Boyd, unsettling stories about her roughhouse boyfriend, and penned the stark, sadomasochistic ‘He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)’; cut by the Crystals with an uncharacteristically minimal production from Phil Spector, it was far too cold and disturbing for radio and flopped (for having her dirty laundry aired so publicly, Little Eva was later rewarded with ‘The Locomotion’, a substantially bigger hit).
Later, the couple turned to their own damaged relationship for inspiration. Few pop records are more clangorous and uncomfortable than Judy Henske’s ‘Road to Nowhere’, the lyrics – ‘I’ve tried to hold on for as long as I can’ – spat out like so much sour milk, over vicious, dissonant piano and jagged percussion. Especially desperate, the Righteous Brothers’ ‘Just Once in My Life’ (US no. 9 ’65) includes the bawled line ‘I can’t give you the world, but I would crawl for you girl’.8 Goffin and King finally divorced in 1968.
When Don Kirshner opened the doors to Aldon Music’s new, plush premises at 711 Fifth Avenue in the spring of 1963, he must have felt like the boss of New York pop. Kirshner had sold Aldon to Columbia Pictures, made himself a million dollars and moved to a fancy address adjacent to Tiffany’s. The new offices, though, were gauchely decorated. When they arrived to work, his writers were suddenly lacking inspiration; soon they stopped turning up completely. Panicking, Kirshner installed cubicles reminiscent of their old 1650 Broadway hangout to make them feel at home, but according to Cynthia Weil, ‘They looked like concentration camps. Like we were automatons who were supposed to go in there and write.’
When Kirshner damaged the fragile ecosystem of Aldon by moving off Broadway, the seeds were sown for the sound’s downfall.9 Goffin and King wrote another twenty hits over the next twelve months, but moving their family home from Brooklyn to West Orange, New Jersey (again at Kirshner’s behest), only distanced them further from the teen scene they drew upon.
Gerry Goffin and Carole King were passengers in Aldon colleague Russ Titelman’s car on a summer night in 1964. They were all on their way to see A Hard Day’s Night open in Manhattan. But as they approached the Lincoln Tunnel, King begged Titelman to turn round and take them back home to West Orange. She was afraid that she would be watching the world they knew dissolve on the cinema screen, and she was scared.
1 Southern, Mills and Famous-Paramount were the earliest publishers to move into the Brill, beginning the trend during the Depression, when the building had few other takers.
2 On the compilation Elvis’ Golden Records, released in 1958, the sleevenotes called them ‘the Gilbert and Sullivan of Rock and Roll’. Elsewhere, according to Stoller, ‘we were called the Grandfathers of Rock ’n’ Roll. At the time, we were twenty-five.’
3 ‘I thought he was a terrible music snob,’ said Leiber of Stoller, recalling their first meeting years later, ‘and I think so did he.’
4 As a kid in New York, Stoller hung out with a Puerto Rican girl, and was introduced to congas, timbales, guiros and cowbells played on brownstone stoops on summer nights. He first heard the baion rhythm on the soundtrack of the Silvana Mangano movie Anna, and quickly absorbed it into his songwriting.
5 Bruce Springsteen played an acoustic version of ‘We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place’ at the South by Southwest festival in 2012 and declared: ‘That’s every song I’ve ever written. That’s all of them. I’m not kidding, either.’
6 A non-charting record that has everything good and progressive about the Brill sound – dramatically urban, adventurous, and fervent – is ‘The Drifter’ by Ray Pollard, a former Ink Spot who had lost an arm in Korea. It was written by Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein and Richard Gottehrer, a team best known for the Angels’ gum-chewing bad-girl hit ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ (US no. 1, UK no. 50 ’63) and the McCoys’ fabulous but artless frathouse anthem ‘Hang on Sloopy’ (US no. 1, UK no. 5 ’65). But if you can get past the middle eight of ‘The Drifter’ without welling up, you’re made of colder stuff than me.
7 The songwriters thought of their songs as having a shelf life of a few weeks. Nevertheless, it was more than two decades after the dissolution of the great Brill Building teams before a year went by without at least one of their songs charting on Billboard’s Hot Hundred.
8 The CD age revealed this line could be ‘I’d work hard for you girl’, but the AM static of the sixties made it more intense.
9 I was only born the year of the British Invasion, and yet it seems to me like something wonderful was nipped in the bud in 1964. The Brill Building aesthetic carried on in reduced circumstances after the Beatles stormed America, notably with
the Red Bird label (the Dixie Cups, Ad Libs and Shangri-Las), Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio’s songs for the Four Seasons, and the later Phil Spector hits (the Ronettes’ ‘Walking in the Rain’ and ‘(The Best Part of) Breaking Up’) – here was proof that there were possibilities for further development. Older heads were still learning and perfecting their specialised craft; new writers (Neil Diamond, Al Kooper), producers (Bert Berns) and arrangers (Horace Ott, Arnold Goland) were on hand to take pop higher, deeper, somewhere more intense. Instead, Merseybeat, at heart a reductivist sound, killed this progression stone dead.
PART TWO
12
ACT NATURALLY: THE BEATLES
In January 1964 the Beatles left London for Paris. Even at the height of Beatlemania, with the world at their feet, they acted like hormonally challenged schoolkids, badgering manager Brian Epstein to arrange a tête-à-tête with Brigitte Bardot. They had to make do with playing support to local blonde pin-up Sylvie Vartan instead – the last time they would play second fiddle to anyone – and would recall with forgetful bemusement how, strangely, the audience was largely made up of frothing boys.