The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  The idea made economic sense as well. As historian Elijah Wald has observed, “The money one earned from writing and recording even a million-selling single was peanuts compared with what one got for writing and recording every song on a string of million-selling albums. The combination of prestige and wealth was irresistible.”

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  One of the biggest demographic changes of the twentieth century was the northern migration of African-Americans, and its effect on popular song was as great as on any other facet of American life. A key hub was Chicago, where Sam Cooke, born in Mississippi in 1931, moved as a toddler with his family. Cooke started out singing gospel, moved into doo-wop, and released his first single as a solo artist in 1957. It was a tune he had written, “You Send Me,” and it shot to number one on the charts. (On the B side was Cooke’s version of the George Gershwin–Ira Gershwin–DuBose Heyward “Summertime.”) Around the same time, two Chicago guys named Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield were singing in a quartet called the Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers. In 1958 they went secular as Jerry Butler and the Impressions; Mayfield, on guitar, was the only instrumentalist. He also proved to be an inspired and prolific songwriter. As the Impressions (Butler left early on to go solo), the group had a string of hits in the early sixties, climaxed in 1965 by Mayfield’s gospel-influenced protest song “People Get Ready,” number nine on the Mojo list of the greatest songs of all time.

  An even bigger urban center, as far as music was concerned, was Detroit, where the percentage of black residents increased more than sevenfold between 1920 and 1960, from 4 percent to more than 29 percent. Berry Gordy was born in the city in 1929, to parents who had come up from Georgia seven years earlier. He returned from serving in Korea in 1953, spent some time as a professional boxer and a record store manager, then succeeded in placing some songs he’d written with the singer Jackie Wilson. He began managing a few performers—notably the Miracles, a local singing group led by William “Smokey” Robinson—and in 1959 launched his own record label, Tamla, which would in due time change its name to Motown. As Gordy’s vision turned into reality, the company became less like a traditional label than an entertainment version of the Chrysler plant whose clock he had once punched. Gordy’s model was the vertically integrated Tin Pan Alley of 1915, except that he seized control of even more elements of the process. The company not only issued the records but controlled all aspects of the recording process, and had under contract artists, backing musicians (a crackerjack combination known as the Funk Brothers), and writers. Gordy had very particular ideas about the nature of the songs that would appear on his label. Early on, he paid a call on Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in New York and explained to them, as Leiber recalled, that “he wanted to make R&B more appealing to whites by softening the sound.” Gordy was true to his vision. Motown records offered a new kind of soul: the sound was unmistakably black yet had a glossier pop sheen than what was coming out of Memphis or Muscle Shoals. Gordy’s roster of prodigiously talented tunesmiths was led by Robinson, sometimes working alone and sometimes with various collaborators, and two teams: Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, and Lamont Dozier and Brian and Eddie Holland. (The singers Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye eventually became top songwriters for Motown as well.) Melodically, the classic Motown song was characterized by an irresistible hook, and lyrically by unlikely metaphors and a transformation of the vernacular into street poetry: “Ain’t That Peculiar,” “I Second That Emotion,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” “Can I Get a Witness?,” and “I Can’t Help Myself.” These songs harked back thirty or more years, to when Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin were doing much the same thing with “Nice Work If You Can Get It” and “Let Yourself Go.”

  The various teams were primed to compete with each other. Demos of new songs were played at Friday morning meetings, with the best ones assigned to the hottest group or singer of the moment. Things really heated up late in 1964. When Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You”) for Marvin Gaye, Robinson answered with “My Girl” for the Temptations. H-D-H came back with “Nowhere to Run” for Martha and the Vandellas; Robinson’s response was “Ooo Baby Baby” for his own group, the Miracles. All astonishing songs, hitting the charts in a four-month span. Just a couple of months later, Robinson and the Miracles recorded what could be the greatest Motown song of all, “The Tracks of My Tears.” The writers were capable of turning out first-rate material with incredible speed. One morning Gordy found out that Columbia Records, previous home of the Motown group the Four Tops, was going to rerelease one of the Tops’ old records. He instructed his top team at the time, Holland-Dozier-Holland, to produce a response, and by early afternoon they’d come up with “It’s the Same Old Song.” The track was recorded later the same day; the record was in stores three days later. It reached number five on the charts and became a classic. (The Columbia Four Tops release peaked at number 93.)

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  It wasn’t that everything was happening in the hinterlands. The traditional outposts of New York and Los Angeles were fertile ground for new kinds of songs, too. When last glimpsed, Burt Bacharach was failing miserably as a Brill Building cleffer in the early fifties. In 1956, publisher Eddy Wolpin paired him with the veteran lyricist Hal David. Cue the Hollywood ending? Not so fast. The team’s early efforts were undistinguished and, with the exception of “The Story of My Life” for Marty Robbins and “Magic Moments” for Perry Como, unsuccessful. Bacharach spent a couple of years touring the world as Marlene Dietrich’s music director. On a stop in Rio de Janeiro, he and the singer would walk in the hills at night and hear drumbeats coming up from the city. “That was the first time I heard the baion beat,” Bacharach recalled, “where the one is followed by a one-beat pause and then two half-beats.”

  When he returned to New York in 1961, something clicked—some combination of the sounds he’d absorbed on his travels, his classical training, the lessons he’d learned from modern jazz artists like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and just being ready to find his voice as a writer. Between 1961 and 1964, Bacharach produced a string of remarkable songs, including “Baby It’s You,” “Only Love Can Break a Heart,” “Wives and Lovers,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” “A House Is Not a Home,” “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me,” “Any Day Now” (which featured the baion), and “Make It Easy on Yourself.” (Hal David’s brother Mack wrote the lyrics for “Baby It’s You,” Bob Hilliard for “Any Day Now,” and Hal David for all the rest.) Chicago’s Vee-Jay Records bought the Bacharach–Hal David “Make It Easy on Yourself” for Jerry Butler, and assigned Bacharach himself to produce and conduct the recording session. The experience was a revelation for the composer. “After I did that session,” he recalled, “I knew I never wanted to work any other way again, because by actually being in the studio while the record was being cut, I could protect my material and make the song sound the way I had heard it in my head. . . . I could start with a framework and then evolve from that as the musicians heard the song and then played it.”

  Interviewed by Billboard in 1964, Bacharach took pains to convey how much labor he and David (but especially he) put into every composition:

  We take three days to two weeks to compose a song, working separately and together. We hear the song over 400 times in going over it. When we feel it is right and have taught the song to the artist and thoroughly rehearsed the performance, we are up to about 450 listenings. I then go home and plan the arrangement which gives me another 80 listenings. We then do maybe 24 takes in the studio. We listen to the play-backs, re-mix and listen to the acetates. After 1,000 listenings we must force ourselves to listen to the record as if we had just thought of it and were hearing it in completed form for close to the very first time.

  The final piece of the puzzle, for Bacharach, came when he met Dionne Warrick, a backup singer on the Drifters’ record of his song “Mexican Divorce”; he was struck by
her “special kind of grace and elegance.” In 1962 she recorded the Bacharach–David “Don’t Make Me Over,” nailing the rapid pitch changes and the rhythm switch from 12/8 to 6/8. (When the record came out, her name on the label was misspelled “Warwick,” and she adopted the new spelling.) She became, literally, the voice of Bacharach and David’s music, recording “Walk On By,” “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” and, by the time the curtain came down on the sixties, more than thirty of their songs. “Dionne could sing that high and she could sing that low,” Bacharach marveled. “She could sing that strong and she could sing that loud, yet she could also be soft and delicate. As our musical relationship evolved, I began to see her potential and realized I could take more risks and chances.”

  Rhythmically, melodically, and harmonically, Bacharach–David songs zig when you expect them to zag. The lyrics are more conventional, but in an unassuming way they stand up to and complement the musical experimentation. The faster numbers show the brand the clearest; a little like Van Heusen and Cahn in the previous decade, Bacharach and David were reinventing and modernizing the upbeat pop song. Overall their music provided, as well as any body of work, a soundtrack for the period.

  Bacharach and David started out as Brill Building songwriters, with all that designation entailed, and it’s curious that in later years it would commonly be applied to another, younger group of writers, most of whom weren’t even based in Brill. This cohort fit in with the traditional Tin Pan Alley–New York–Jewish demographic, with one notable departure: a lot of them were female. Carol Klein was born in Brooklyn in 1942; in high school, inspired by her neighborhood friend Neil Sedaka and the high school math curriculum, she started a band called the Co-Sines. In 1958, ABC-Paramount signed her to a recording contract and changed her name to Carole King. Her parents saw to it that she kept at her studies, and in 1959 she met a fellow Queens College student named Gerry Goffin, who wrote lyrics. They formed a team (and eventually a marriage) and signed on as staff songwriters at Aldon Music; the terms were $1,000 for a year, against royalties. (The main character of Bye Bye Birdie owns a publishing company called Almaelou, surely an intentional similarity.) The company had offices at 1650 Broadway, a building peopled mainly by BMI-affiliated publishers, as opposed to the more established ASCAP brands down the block at the Brill Building. It had been formed by a fairly unsuccessful songwriter named Don Kirshner and an Alley veteran named Al Nevins for the express purpose of feeding rock and roll’s voracious maw.

  Like Motown, the company used competition as a motivational tool. In her memoir, A Natural Woman, King wrote that every Aldon team was assigned a cubicle:

  Each was barely big enough to contain an upright piano with a bench, a chair for the lyricist, and a small table with enough room for a legal pad, a pen, an ashtray, and a coffee cup. The proximity of each cubicle to the next added an “echo” factor. While I was playing the song on which Gerry and I were working, we heard only our song. As soon as I stopped playing we could hear the song on which the team in the next cubicle was working. Not surprisingly, with each of us trying to write the follow-up to an artist’s current hit, everyone’s song sounded similar to everyone else’s. But only one would be chosen. Inevitably the insecurity of the writers and the competitive atmosphere fostered by Donnie spurred each team on to greater effort, which resulted in better songs. It wasn’t only about writing a great song; it was about winning.

  Goffin and King won most of the time, turning out a lot of not-always-distinguishable four-chord material recorded with varying degrees of success by Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney, the Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, James Darren, Steve Lawrence, Dion, and the Cookies, an African-American girl group who recorded a rhythm number of theirs called “Chains.” King was still in her teens when she wrote many of these tracks, Goffin was barely out of his, and even the least memorable of their songs had an appealing heartfelt quality, with none of the clock-punching cynicism that the older Brill Building songwriters’ youth-market efforts betrayed. And some of their work was piercing, empathic lyrics complementing soulful melodies. That was decidedly true of their first big hit, in which Goffin convincingly spoke with the voice of a teenage girl. The Shirelles took “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” to number one in January 1961 and earned the writers a $10,000 advance from Kirshner. In 1963, for a male black singing group, the Drifters, Goffin and King penned the ultimate urban escape song, “Up on the Roof.”

  Neil Sedaka and his partner, Howard Greenfield, were signed to Aldon, but, by accident rather than design, the company specialized in young husband-and-wife songwriting teams. The first to approximate Goffin and King’s success consisted of Cynthia Weil (lyrics) and Barry Mann (music). Weil, who was another one of Frank Loesser’s finds, teamed with Mann in 1961. They started out with bubblegum fare but ventured into more ambitious efforts, notably “Uptown” and “On Broadway,” the latter a collaboration with rock-and-roll veterans Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. These were little symphonies, with distinctive movements, elaborate production, heavy use of strings, and a palpable social awareness.

  Leiber and Stoller had moved their operation from L.A. to New York a couple of years earlier, and were working as producers for Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler’s Atlantic Records. For a new incarnation of the Drifters, a veteran doo-wop group, they wrote and produced a series of songs that featured big string arrangements and pulsing Latin rhythms: “There Goes My Baby,” “This Magic Moment,” “Save the Last Dance for Me.” Like Bacharach, Leiber and Stoller had found and fallen in love with baion. When the Drifters’ lead singer, Ben E. King, left the group in 1960, his first hit was “Spanish Harlem,” a Latin-tinged collaboration between Leiber and Stoller and Phil Spector, an L.A. kid they had taken on as a combination apprentice producer and contract writer. (“He wore his ambition like a topcoat,” Leiber said of Spector years later. “It was all over him.”) That song hit big and so did the follow-up, which had a Leiber–Stoller–Ben E. King songwriting credit: “Stand by Me.”

  As the continental crisscrossing of Leiber, Stoller, and Spector suggests, this rebooted, youth-centered Tin Pan Alley was peripatetic. Sam Cooke made his way from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he wrote and recorded such hits as “Bring It on Home to Me,” “Another Saturday Night,” and “Wonderful World”—the last cowritten with Herb Alpert and Lou Adler, two young L.A. writers and producers who co-managed the surf group Jan and Dean. (Alpert played some trumpet, too.) By that time Spector was back home in L.A., on his way to becoming the central figure on the pop music scene there. Periodically, young New York writers made pilgrimages to work with him, much as Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths had trekked west in the early days of talkies. Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich—yet another husband-and-wife team, who were under contract to Lieber and Stoller’s publishing company—went out to the coast in 1963 to collaborate with Spector on “Be My Baby,” a number-two record for the girl group the Ronettes. The next year, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann teamed with him on an even bigger hit, the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” Already, Spector was paying as much attention to production as songwriting, if not more. Mann and Weil went back to New York, and Spector started tinkering with the recording. After a few weeks he played them the finished record, Mann recalled years later. “I yelled over the phone to get Phil’s attention: ‘Phil, you’ve got it on the wrong speed.’ The song we had written had been about three ticks faster and a tone and a half higher. Phil came on and said, ‘Barry, that’s the record.’” The original recording ran three minutes and five seconds, the retooled version 3:45. But Spector had 3:05 printed on the label, so deejays would think it was shorter.

  Spector wasn’t just fussing with tempo. He belabored every aspect of the recording and editing, eventually turning into a somewhat more obsessive and less genial latter-day Mitch Miller. His most famous contribution was the multilayered approach to instrumentation that would become known as “the Wall of Sound.” A key element of his work wa
s the Wrecking Crew, a loosely defined group of backing musicians that included Leon Russell on piano, James Burton and Glen Campbell on guitar, Cheryl LaPiere (who usually went by just “Cher”) on background vocals, and Hal Blaine—who gave the Crew its name—on drums. The Wrecking Crew would play, usually anonymously, behind virtually every song that came out of Los Angeles in the sixties. Dean Martin used them on his 1964 number one song, “Everybody Loves Somebody.” That impressed Frank Sinatra, and, backed by the Crew, he matched his buddy’s success with “Something Stupid” and the doo-be-doo-be-doo “Strangers in the Night.”

  It sure wasn’t Ray Evans and Jay Livingston’s L.A.—or even Henry Mancini’s and Johnny Mandel’s. A link between that rapidly fading Hollywood music world and the new reality was Randy Newman. His father was a Los Angeles doctor, but his three uncles were all Hollywood composers and conductors, and he spent a lot of time with them, absorbing all the musical knowledge his brain could hold. Crucially, his mother came from New Orleans, and Randy spent his summers there until he was eleven, absorbing the rhythms and attitudes that permeated the air.