Rock 'N' ROLL died toward the end of the 1950's, when Elvis Presley got his G.I. buzz cut, Little Richard found religion, Chuck Berry was arrested, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash and Jerry Lee Lewis drove his fans away by taking his 13-year-old cousin as his bride (while still married to his second wife). The music that replaced the supercharged version of rhythm and blues made by those men was polished and faintly ridiculous, but it ruled the airwaves until the Beatles set things aright by scaring off all rock 'n' roll pretenders with their primitive-seeming mop-top energy.
That's how the myth goes, anyway. It's a version of the truth that the veteran music writer Ken Emerson punctures in "Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era."
Emerson's book tells the story of the New York songwriters who came up with "Be My Baby," "Save the Last Dance for Me," "Stand by Me," "Up on the Roof" and "On Broadway," among many, many others. It makes a nice case for the distinctive sound these songwriters created in the interlude between Presley's sailing off to Bremerhaven and the Beatles' touching down at Idlewild.
The hitmakers of "Always Magic in the Air" worked in small offices at the Brill Building itself, 1619 Broadway, or else up the street, under the watchful eye of the hustling music publisher Don Kirshner and his business partner, Al Nevins, in an unnamed building at 1650 Broadway. Thirteen of the 14 songwriters considered here were born or raised in New York City (9 in Brooklyn, 3 in Queens, 1 in Manhattan). Thirteen were Jewish and they all knew from a catchy hook, even to the point of driving listeners insane (e.g., "Da Doo Ron Ron"). They got into music either because their mothers made them take piano lessons (Neil Sedaka) or because they wanted to transcend the rumpus of living in a cramped apartment (Doc Pomus).
They formed seven songwriting pairs. At the Brill Building were the elder statesmen Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; the classically trained Burt Bacharach and his expert word man, Hal David; the blues-besotted Doc Pomus and his polymathic co-writer, Mort Shuman; and the more strictly pop-oriented husband-and-wife duo of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Working at Kirshner's stable were two more husband-and-wife teams: Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, as well as King's old high-school-days pal, the melody god Sedaka, and his lyricist, Howard Greenfield. Once they "became keenly conscious that they were writing records, not songs," as Emerson puts it, the majority of them doubled as producers and arrangers.
As New Yorkers, they had a musical palette perhaps broader than that of the wild men of rock 'n' roll's earlier days, drawing their inspiration not just from rhythm and blues but also from classical composers, Irving Berlin, "West Side Story," Hank Williams, doo-wop, bebop and, especially, the Latin music they danced to at the Palladium Ballroom (at 1698 Broadway). Doc Pomus called his work for the Drifters "Jewish Latin."
Although they worked in the manner of white-collar drones, their music was often as charged as anything else in pop, Emerson argues. And while their main goal was to hack out hit singles for teenagers, they created an enduring, particularly New York brand of rock 'n' roll. "They enriched it not only with a Latin savor but also with strings and echoes of classical music," he writes. "Working with black artists such as the Drifters, Ben E. King and Dionne Warwick, they helped create modern soul music and gave it an uptown urbanity."
The author has little patience for the "authenticity" argument. Citing two current acts who have recorded Bacharach-David songs, he writes, "However disparate their music, Clay Aiken and the White Stripes are equally pop." In the same vein, he notes that Presley himself scored No. 1 hits with songs ("Hound Dog," "Jailhouse Rock") written by Leiber and Stoller, and that, early on, the Beatles recorded Goffin-King's "Chains." Later British invasion bands, who, myth would have it, put an end to the Brill Building style, also made hits from material cranked out at 1650 and 1619 Broadway.
"Always Magic in the Air" is a second rescue mission of sorts for Emerson, a former articles editor of The New York Times Magazine. His first book, "Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture," traced the gnarled 19th-century roots of American pop music while telling the hard-luck tale of the underappreciated, politically inconvenient songwriter who gave the world "Oh! Susanna," "De Camptown Races" and "Old Black Joe."
Fascinating characters lurk in the narrative's periphery, among them the mad-genius producer Phil Spector, a pre-stardom Tony Orlando and Irving Caesar, the lyricist of "Tea for Two." Bob Dylan makes a funny cameo appearance. It takes place backstage at Carnegie Hall, in October 1965, after he had played a well-received show. Goffin, a lyricist who felt "like a dwarf" compared to Dylan, approached the rising singer-songwriter, "shook his hand and said, 'You've got a right to be very proud of yourself.' 'I do?' Dylan deadpanned."
A generous but sometimes plodding writer, Emerson takes flight when describing the cosmopolitan musical mixtures that defined the best work of the Brill Building set. When the Drifters' baritone Ben Nelson (soon to go solo as Ben E. King) presented his producers, Leiber and Stoller, with a song he had just written, "There Goes My Baby," Emerson reports, the Brill Building partners "heard something new that Nelson had never imagined. They heard strings." And not just any strings, but strings with a Russian flavor. They also heard a Brazilian baion beat as it had been used in the theme song to an Italian film, "Anna." Before "There Goes My Baby" was recorded, Emerson writes, "no one had ever been so audacious as to wed the Italian bastardization of a Brazilian samba to an ersatz Russian string orchestration on a rhythm-and-blues record by an African-American quartet."
With as many major players as "War and Peace," the author strains at times to squeeze them all into his 334 pages. His most vividly drawn character is probably Pomus, who was born Jerome Felder in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and stricken with polio at age 6. He played clarinet, alto saxophone and a baby grand piano that was "the only decent piece of furniture in the house," his brother, the celebrity divorce lawyer Raoul Felder, told Emerson. As a fat teenager on crutches, he underwent a superhero-like change into Doc Pomus one night in a Greenwich Village tavern, when he belted out Big Joe Turner's "Piney Brown Blues" before a late-night crowd. He later wrote a song recorded by Ray Charles, the mournful "Lonely Avenue," before teaming up with Shuman.
"Always Magic in the Air," which gets its title from "On Broadway" (written by Mann-Weil and Leiber-Stoller), is full of new reporting. Emerson interviewed 10 of the 11 living Brill Building-era songwriters, as well as family members and friends of the three no longer with us (Pomus, Shuman, Greenfield). Only Carole King seems to have turned him down. Is this why Emerson gives short shrift to her remarkable transformation from second-billed songwriter to mega-selling singer-songwriter in the 1970's?
Until this book, the story of these interrelated songwriters had been told in piecemeal fashion, via memoirs, magazine articles and four separate documentaries for the A&E network's "Biography" series. Here we get the whole tale in a single entertaining package. The book has less drug taking, sex and money than the usual pop music history. But there's definitely more bowling, babies and mah-jongg.