Songwriters from the Brill Building era composed rock of ages

Leslie Gray Streeter, The Palm Beach Post

Published December 6, 2005 at midnight

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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - It's one of the most famous buildings in pop-culture history, recognized as the cradle of the mid-20th century music industry, the birthplace of teen pop and the Wall of Sound.

But in truth, Manhattan's Brill Building, the legendary center of songwriting at 1619 Broadway, owes a lot of its reputation to a lesser-known edifice across the street.

"It was really at 1650 Broadway!" says producer Don Kirshner, whose Aldon Music was the home of songwriters Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and more. "All this excitement was about the wrong name and the wrong building!"

Actually, the occupants of both buildings, which included Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David, contributed to a singular era, creating music using a self-contained hit factory of publishers, producers, songwriters and arrangers. These songwriters put the soon-to-be-famous words in the mouths of Elvis (Jailhouse Rock), The Coasters (Poison Ivy), Bobby Darin (Splish Splash), The Drifters (There Goes My Baby), the Righteous Brothers (You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling) and others.

But the cultural and historical significance of these songs and the people who created them have been ignored, says music writer Ken Emerson, author of the new book Always Magic in the Air: the Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era.

Emerson's book and a new boxed set from Rhino, One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost & Found, is putting a focus back on the era, which was eclipsed by Beatlemania and dismissed for years by rock critics.

"There is the feeling that these are great songs, and you always hear them on golden oldies stations, on soundtracks and in the background. But it's not considered the kind of music to be taken as seriously as some others," says Emerson, whose title comes, appropriately, from a line in The Drifters' On Broadway.

Some of the people who put their stamp on the era, including Kirshner, arranger Charles Calello and singer Dion DiMucci, formerly of Dion and the Belmonts, all live at least part time in Boca Raton, Fla.

"It's almost like the Brill Building's down here now," says Calello, whose work includes the Bach- based A Lover's Concerto, by The Toys, and the hits of the Four Seasons, which he arranged. He was also briefly a member of the group, whose story is now portrayed in Jersey Boys, which recently opened on Broadway and was featured in the recent Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC.

Also interestingly, the 1960 film Where the Boys Are and Kirshner's production of Connie Francis' yearning theme song are "responsible for the whole Florida spring-break revolution," he says. "So there's a connection there!"

While no one seems to think there's anything deliberate about the Boca relocation of so many Brill-era players, all agree that there was something deeper, if not magical, about the sheer numbers of hits composed there. Kirshner believes it was because of all the talent packed into one place.

"The atmosphere (at 1650 Broadway) was so incredible. There were different cubicles - Goffin and King would be in one room, Mann and Weil in one, Sedaka and Greenfield in another. There was this atmosphere - the worst song could be a No. 1 song. It was much more than just being in the right place at the right time," he recalls.

"If you look back at the way the record business evolved, that Brill era could never be duplicated, because New York, at that time, was the central place that people came to get their record deal," says Calello. "The New York scene, by far, had the most songwriters."

The Brill Building, named after two brothers who owned the building and a clothing store on its first floor, opened in 1931 and began to house music publishers who had originally occupied the so-called Tin Pan Alley district on 28th Street. The center changed in 1958, when Kirshner, a former Catskills bellhop, college basketball player and would-be songwriter with no musical training but a fierce belief in his ability to discern a hit, opened the offices of Aldon Music at 1650 Broadway with partner Al Nevins.

Emerson's book introduces the pair in a chapter called Partners in Chutzpah, a label Kirshner cops to.

" 'Chutzpah' means having a lot of nerve, and when I played ball, I was very competitive" says Kirshner, who pitched his first song to singer Frankie Laine while carrying his bags.

"You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know how to be a part of greatness. I was smart enough to know that these were great songs."

There were many great songs written in those buildings, and many up-and-coming singers, songwriters and producers who would one day be legendary worked within them.

"In the early '60s, there were so many eccentric people running the record companies, who were in positions of power. They were so colorful," says singer Gene Pitney, who scored hits with Bacharach-David songs and wrote The Crystals' He's a Rebel.

"That started to go away in the 1970s. (The industry) became much more of a bean counter's world."

The centralization of the industry, as well as the independent ownership of radio stations, made it easier and faster to make and then break a record, something today's radio conglomerates would make impossible.

"There was more freedom with the disc jockeys, the programmers," Calello said. "We made The Name Game at 2 in the afternoon, had finished all the songs in the session by 5, put (singer) Shirley Ellis' vocals on from 5:30 to 6 and then mixed the record. I drove home on the Jersey Turnpike and heard the song on the radio. Years ago, if they really liked a song, they were going to play it."

Although the era ended when the British Invasion "shoved these songs aside," and though there was a feeling that their sentiments were outdated and manufactured, their influence continued. Emerson and Kirshner point out the influence of those songs on the early writing of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and that the Rolling Stones, The Hollies and The Animals recorded some of them.

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