Brill Building pop songwriting

The Brill Building model returns music to an era when songwriters and performers are separate roles.

This lecture starts with Brill Building pop. In many ways it inherits the Tin Pan Alley model from Chapter 1: publishing-led, driven by writers and their commercial interests. In fact most Tin Pan Alley writers keep rooms in or around Brill Building. We say “Brill Building,” but many studios are not in that tower. Brill Building is 1619 Broadway; you often walk to 51st Street, 1650 Broadway, to find the rooms that matter.

The model restores writer / performer / publisher division of labor. A new role also rises: the producer. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller are among the most important rock songwriters before the Beatles and Bob Dylan in the 1960s. They start in Los Angeles as white writers who really enter Black communities—Black girlfriends, Black clubs, and lasting respect. As Leiber put it, they thought of themselves as Black even though they were not. They pour R&B practice into writing, work for Spark Records, and write and record for many L.A. acts—the Robins, Big Mama Thornton. “Hound Dog” is theirs for Thornton; Elvis later covers it. Thornton cuts it in 1953; interestingly Elvis does not cover their Thornton version but a Las Vegas singer’s rewrite. Leiber says he never wrote the line “you ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine.”

Suddenly Leiber and Stoller have a smash, industry clout, and freer hands. They work with the Coasters—essentially a new Robins moved east. Not all Robins want to leave L.A.; some follow them to New York and Atlantic. They sign an independent deal that lets them work with Atlantic and others. They write songs and also shape records—how a track will be cut and how instruments lock. That is unusual: writers usually stop at the song; arrangement and sound belong to others. With the Coasters they borrow Broadway ideas; narrative songs become “playlets.” As writers they can focus on songs without fretting as much about production—we return to that later. They are among the key 1950s–60s writers, living in New York near Brill Building.

Other writers cluster at Aldon Publishing, 1650 Broadway—one of several houses in the neighborhood, founded by Al Nevins and Don Kirshner in an old-school way. Writers sit in tiny piano cubicles; you hear music through the walls; at day’s end songs compete for recording slots and the company buys from winning teams. Aldon is a pop-songwriting bazaar.

Major teams come out of it. Gerry Goffin and Carole King—King later becomes one of the 1970s’ most important writers, with a multi-decade arc. Their first big hit is the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (No. 1, 1960); in 1961 they top the chart with Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion”—Eva had been their babysitter before they heard her talent. The Cookies’ 1962 “Chains” is later covered by the Beatles; we seldom link the Beatles to girl groups, but they learned a lot from them.

Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich write the Ronettes’ 1963 “Be My Baby” and the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron”; Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann write the Crystals’ 1962 “Uptown”; Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield score with 1961’s “Calendar Girl” and top 1962 with “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” Sedaka often sings their songs himself—a teen idol. In 1975 he remakes “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and reopens a 1970s career.

These writers grind hit after hit for Aldon. That is the Brill Building business: from now on the name means a professional teen-market song factory with writer/performer split (Sedaka and Carole King are exceptions; most writers are not the singers).