The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  He also took in the mystification and resentment of his uncles and their cohort for the new music. “I have enormous sympathy for the people who knew a lot of chords and arrangements and the depth of their hatred for rock and roll,” he said. “They just couldn’t comprehend what had happened—all the years of studying and listening to Glenn Miller and Fletcher Henderson. Even Burt Bacharach. My uncle Lionel once joked that all Bacharach songs sounded like the second oboe part.”

  By the time he entered his freshman year at UCLA, Newman had a job as a staff writer with Metric Music, the publishing wing of the Liberty label. In exchange for $100 a month (increased to $200 after five years), he assigned the publishing rights for everything he produced to the company. (Now, some fifty years later, Newman is starting to get those rights back.) When he finished a song, Wrecking Crew members like Russell, Campbell, and David Gates would put together a demo, and Liberty’s Tommy LiPuma would shop it around to singers. Newman wrote for and sometimes with Jackie DeShannon, a midwestern girl who had moved to L.A. in 1960 and quickly earned contracts for both recording and songwriting. (She would find particular success writing for British bands, as she did with the Searchers’ “When You Walk in the Room,” which led to a brief but fruitful songwriting collaboration with Jimmy Page, later the lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin.) A wide range of artists cut Newman’s songs: between 1962 and 1965, there were records by the Fleetwoods, Vic Dana, Erma Franklin (Aretha’s older sister cut Newman’s “Love Is Blind,” as did Lou Rawls), Frankie Laine (one of his father’s patients), Irma Thomas, and the Tokens. Much of this early work, while craftsmanlike, had a boilerplate quality. “I was trying to do songs that people would do, but it wasn’t where my talents lay,” he said. Still, there were occasional glimpses of Newman’s distinctive talent, as in “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore,” an aching ballad recorded by Jerry Butler in 1964 and, five years later, by Dusty Springfield for her album Dusty in Memphis. A breakthrough was “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” with its elegiac melody, near-recitative bridge, and rueful refrain, “Human kindness is overflowing.” The song, included by Judy Collins on her 1966 album In My Life, presented the unmistakable Newman songwriting voice, with its pervasive irony, and humor and beauty in the midst of desolation—and its sense of writing for a character, as in a short story.

  An even younger writer on the scene was Jimmy Webb, who in 1964, as a seventeen-year-old, moved with his family from Oklahoma to Southern California. The following year his mother died and his father decided to go back to Oklahoma. But Jimmy stayed on to pursue songwriting. He was going to college in San Bernardino and drove up to L.A. every weekend to make the rounds, “carrying my reel-to-reel tapes (in a paper sack).” He’d start with Dick Glasser, a producer at Reprise (the label Sinatra had started in 1961, after leaving Capitol), who, he recalled, was never in a buying mood. “I would go to Warner Bros. and get turned down. Verve, same story. I would hit the studios, Sunset Sound, Western Recorders and storefronts that didn’t have names searching in vain for a singer who needed a song.” One day, on a whim, he called on Jobete Music, Motown’s L.A. publishing arm, and despite his inexperience and skin color, he landed a contract. Webb’s tune “This Is Where I Come In” was recorded by one of Motown’s rare white acts; better yet, he landed a song called “My Christmas Tree” on the Supremes’ 1965 holiday LP. He met and worked with Billy Eckstine and Tony Martin and absorbed the assembly-line songwriting ethos that had been established by Berry Gordy. Webb remembers the rules and instructions: “Put the chorus first. Does it need a bridge or doesn’t it? It was more helpful than a high-priced finishing school.” The next year Webb met singer and producer Johnny Rivers, whom he described as “a much more experienced nineteen-year-old than I was.” Rivers signed him to a publishing deal and recorded an utterly original Webb song called “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” Shortly after that, a group on Rivers’s label, the Fifth Dimension, cut another Webb song, “Up, Up and Away,” with the Wrecking Crew backing up.

  • • •

  One day in 1963, Brian Wilson, the musical leader and main songwriter of a group called the Beach Boys, was driving on a Southern California highway when “Be My Baby” came on the radio. Fifty years later he remembered, “I had to pull over to the side of the road—it blew my mind. It was a shock.” At his first opportunity, he bought the Ronettes’ single and started analyzing everything on it, determined to reproduce its genius for his own group.

  Wilson, his two brothers Dennis and Carl, their cousin Mike Love, and a friend, Al Jardine, had started their band two years earlier. Brian’s compositions were derivative, to put it kindly. The thrust of his lyrics can be sensed from the titles of the band’s early hits: “Surfin’,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Surfer Girl,” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” Except for Brian, none of the boys were very good instrumentalists; the Wrecking Crew were the accompanists on their records, uncredited. The most distinctive thing about the Beach Boys was their sweet, Four Freshmen–influenced harmonies. But after his revelatory moment, Brian Wilson recalled, “I felt like I wanted to try to do something as good as that song.” The effort led him, by the end of the year, to compose two classic pieces: “Don’t Worry Baby” (which took “Be My Baby” explicitly as its model) and “The Warmth of the Sun” (written the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination). In 1964, ’65, and ’66, Wilson would expand his songwriting art, putting down on paper the beautiful and utterly distinctive sound that played continuously in his head. The period culminated in a masterpiece, Pet Sounds, with such songs as “Caroline, No,” “God Only Knows,” and “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).” Linda Ronstadt covered the last and said, “It has one of the most beautiful arcs of a melody I’ve ever heard. How can you sing about not talking, about silence? It’s paralyzing and galvanizing at the same time.”

  Whenever Wilson was asked, though, he acknowledged that he had never made a record better than “Be My Baby.”

  Distilling his yearning into songs, Wilson was a reference point for a particular kind of singer-songwriter who had even earlier models as well: Romantic poets, or, looking yet farther back, medieval troubadours. Most of these young men slung their acoustic guitars on their backs, à la Woody Guthrie, and congregated around Greenwich Village coffeehouses and clubs. Through their use of original material, they began the process of differentiating themselves from earnest Folk Revival acts like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary. The man who drew everyone’s attention was Bob Dylan, but among the others crafting impressive and decreasingly generic new songs in the early sixties were Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, Jim McGuinn, Richard Fariña, and John Sebastian, playing “jug band music or rhythm and blues” or the other genres his band, the Lovin’ Spoonful, would later memorialize in “Do You Believe in Magic?” One of the first to move from authentic or ersatz folk songs, to political statements, all the way to personal expression, was Paul Simon, a buddy of Carole King’s who had once made demos with her at Aldon and had had a minor hit in 1957 with the heavily Everly “Hey, Schoolgirl.” The performance on the tune was credited to Tom and Jerry; “Jerry” was Simon’s lifelong friend Art Garfunkel. By 1964, Columbia released an album under the boys’ real names, Wednesday Morning, 3AM. It did so poorly that the duo decided to split up . . . until a Columbia producer had the idea of remixing one of the songs on the LP to a rock-and-roll arrangement. “The Sounds of Silence” went to number one on the charts, and Simon and Garfunkel were back in business.

  • • •

  The moments that appear in retrospect as obvious and profound turning points don’t usually seem that way at the time. The Beatles’ arrival in America in January 1964, in the form of their single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and their subsequent performances on The Ed Sullivan Show, would appear to be an exception. It escaped no one that the Beatles were amazing. You could glimpse one of the amazing things about them in their knockout performance on Ed Sullivan; the more you kept liste
ning to their records, the clearer it was. This was that they had absorbed basically everything that had happened in American popular music over the previous decade. Their cover songs, even now, radiate unmatched hipness and discernment. They covered King and Goffin (“Chains”), Chuck Berry (“Roll Over Beethoven”), Arthur Alexander (“Anna [Go to Him]”), Bacharach–David (“Walk On By”), the Coasters (“Searchin’”), the Miracles (“You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”), and on and on. They covered the Coasters (“Young Blood”) and they covered Buck Owens, a country singer out of Bakersfield, California (“Act Naturally”). The first song the band ever recorded (when they were still called the Quarrymen) was Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day”; when it came time to acquire a new name, their choice was partly a tribute to Holly’s band, the Crickets. “The Beatles” won out over “The Foreverly Brothers,” which was a contender because they loved the Everlys so much.

  In the cover songs, the Beatles told us where they were coming from. But their originals were much more important. They took the tools and ideas of the 1957–1963 American songbook and exploded them in a glorious centrifugal cascade of melody and riveting vocals, with a back beat you couldn’t lose. The band’s early hits mainly wanted to make the listeners get up, twist, and shout, and that they did. But in 1965 (having absorbed what Bacharach, Dylan, Brian Wilson, the Byrds—a band fronted by Jim McGuinn, now called Roger—and other Yanks were doing, largely in response to them), Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison came out with a collection of songs the likes of which no writer, or even a trio of them, had ever produced in a year. A partial list:

  “Day Tripper,” “Drive My Car,” “Girl,” “Help!,” “If I Needed Someone,” “I’m Looking Through You,” “In My Life,” “It’s Only Love,” “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Michelle,” “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” “Nowhere Man,” “Think for Yourself,” “Ticket to Ride,” “We Can Work It Out,” “The Word,” “Yesterday,” “You Won’t See Me,” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.”

  All of a sudden, as Jimmy Webb put it, “everything shifted. Rock and roll had morphed into something much more interesting musically. It was a gift from God to be alive and working in the music business from 1966 to the early 1970s. It’s hard to imagine a more fecund atmosphere—the air was pregnant. Record companies were willing to let us do anything we wanted to. It wasn’t like Mitch Miller was in the booth.”

  It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the Beatles’ 1965 output set the template for all subsequent pop songs. (If you add their 1966 and 1967 work, the exaggeration recedes nearly to zero.) Lennon’s “In My Life” was as confessional and moving as anything by Dylan or the new singer-songwriters already starting to emerge. A host of them were warming up for their entrances: John Prine in Chicago, James Taylor out of Massachusetts, Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark in Texas, Jeff Buckley and Jackson Browne in California, Kris Kristofferson in Nashville, and an impressive Canadian contingent comprising Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young. “Norwegian Wood,” also a Lennon tune, with its sitar accompaniment and minor-key voicings, suggested pop might fruitfully plant its flag in foreign lands. And if you closed your eyes while listening to McCartney’s “Yesterday,” you could swear you were listening to a lost classic from the Great American Songbook. Less than a year after that song’s release, Billboard declared it a “modern standard” and reported that more than 175 versions had already been released, including renditions by Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, Xavier Cugat, and Mantovani.

  The final page had been turned on one songbook. Another was just starting to be written.

  Founded in 1914, ASCAP collected payments for songwriters and exemplified the professional-ization of what had been a disorganized trade. Some of the founders and early members (from left): Gene Buck, Victor Herbert, John Philip Sousa, Harry B. Smith, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George W. Meyer, Irving Bibo, and Otto Harbach.

  Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, both Jewish New Yorkers, propelled the American popular song to new and unimagined popularity and musical distinction.

  In the Great American Songbook era (roughly 1925–1950), songwriters were almost always photographed at the piano. Cole Porter wrote both the words and the music, but there was usually a division of labor.

  Richard Rodgers (left) and Lorenz Hart.

  Jerome Kern and the lyricist Dorothy Fields—the only woman to crack the boys’ club of American songwriting.

  The composer Harry Warren (left) and his lyricist partner Al Dubin went to Hollywood early and provided songs for the great Warner Bros. musicals of the 1930s.

  Harold Arlen (left) and Johnny Mercer.

  Arthur Schwartz, in a 1933 portrait by Carl Van Vechten.

  A younger generation of songwriters who came along in the early 1940s was deeply influenced by jazz and found success writing for Hollywood. Above: Composer Jule Styne (left) and lyricist Sammy Cahn. Below: Jimmy Van Heusen (left) and Johnny Burke, who became known as Bing Crosby’s personal songwriting team. Van Heusen and Cahn would fruitfully team up in the 1950s.

  Duke Ellington often composed melodies with the help of players in his splendid orchestra. Sometimes he even gave them credit.

  Jay Livingston (at the piano) and Ray Evans were University of Pennsylvania graduates who struggled for years before getting staff songwriting jobs at Paramount Pictures. The first of their three Academy Awards was for “Buttons and Bows,” sung by Bob Hope.

  From the middle 1930s to the late 1940s, big bands were the primary delivery system for popular music. The biggest band of all was Glenn Miller’s, here at a 1939 engagement at the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City. Miller is the right-hand trombonist with glasses; girl singer Marion Hutton waits patiently for her chorus.

  Frank Sinatra—captured by photographer William “PoPsie” Randolph during a 1943 concert with Jan Savitt at the keyboards—was the first ex–band singer to create a sensation as a solo artist.

  Nat “King” Cole, who started out leading a jazz trio, and Billie Holiday (with guitarist Jimmy McLin at a 1939 Commodore Records session) were masters at bringing out the jazz rhythms and harmonies that lay at the foundation of the Great American Songbook.

  In the early 1950s, pop songs drifted away from the traditional jazz foundation into unexpected new directions. In his 1951 smash hit “Cry,” Johnnie Ray displayed the sort of raw emotion that had always remained well below the surface.

  The childlike ditty “The Doggie in the Window” sold two million copies for Patti Page in 1953—and engendered no small number of gag publicity shots.

  In the early 1950s, Frank Sinatra’s recordings—overseen by Columbia Records artist and repertoire chief Mitch Miller, here meeting the singer at LaGuardia Airport in 1952—barely dented the charts.

  Tin Pan Alley song pluggers waiting for an audience with Miller, who chose the material for every Columbia popular release and was the first music “producer” in the modern sense.

  Old-line songwriters, mystified by the new sounds coming over the airwaves, argued in the courts and before Congress that record companies and radio networks were conspiring against them. Rallying to the cause were (left to right, front row) Steve Allen, Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Adler, Dorothy Fields, Otto Harbach, Leo Shull, and (back row) Arthur Schwartz, Bob Merrill, Harold Rome, and Stanley Adams.

  The Brill Building, at 1619 Broadway, was the hub of Tin Pan Alley in mid-twentieth-century America.

  Frank Loesser—here rehearsing with Marlon Brando, star of the film version of Loesser’s Guys and Dolls—was a mentor to, role model for, and publisher of many young songwriters in the fifties.

  Lyricist Carolyn Leigh (shown with the tools of her trade) and the supremely versatile Ervin Drake tried to negotiate the often difficult new rules of the songwriting game.

  Tony Bennett made a deal with Mitch Miller: for every pop single he recorded, he got to lay
down a jazz-style track for release on a Columbia LP.

  In the forties and fifties, the cabaret singer Mabel Mercer kept alive such standards as “Little Boy Blue” and “My Funny Valentine”—like a monk “hiding manuscripts in the Dark Ages.”

  Trumpeter Miles Davis made his name with penetrating interpretations of ballads from the American Songbook.

  Producer Norman Granz revitalized Ella Fitzgerald’s career—and the tradition of classic American popular song—with a series of “Songbook” albums devoted to the great composers.

  Arranger Nelson Riddle met Frank Sinatra in a Capitol recording studio in 1953. Magic ensued.

  The rock-and-roll explosion created a huge demand for songs, and unprecedented opportunities for young songwriters. The publisher Aldon Music had several married “cleffing” teams on staff, including Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Clockwise, King (in hat), Weil, Mann, and Goffin.