The Importance of the Brill Building Sound

The Brill Building Sound: A Rock High Point

By Steven Rosen

(I am posting this story, which ran in Paste Magazine in 2005, as a way of honoring and remembering Ellie Greenwich, who passed away last week.)


A long, long time ago, when Don McLean’s “American Pie” was new in late 1971 and early 1972, everyone tried to analyze what he meant by “the day the music died.”

With time, the general consensus – aided by McLean’s own comments – has come to be that he was referring to Feb. 3, 1959, when the sweet-voiced rock ‘n’ roll innocent Buddy Holly died in a plane crash along with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper.

But with time, I’ve come to my own belief about that day. To me, it actually was Feb. 9, 1964, when the Beatles took the stage of New York’s “Ed Sullivan Show.”

Now, for many years – decades, even – I had believed that date was when rock was revived and reborn after the post-Holly years. And then Dylan came along to wed rock with lyrical relevance. And I still believe that. But rock and the British Invasion (and even Dylan) may have killed something far better – the Brill Building Sound. And that musically and socially progressive youth-oriented genre of the early 1960s looms with each passing year as the best popular music since the classic Great American Songbook composers.

While a rather vague term, it most narrowly refers to songwriters – especially the youthful teams of Gerry Goffin and Carole King and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil – who wrote for the Aldon Music publishing company. It actually was located nearby rather than inside Manhattan’s Brill Building, itself a long-established home to publishers.

Yes, this music was better than the Beatles. At least, it was better at the moment when the Beatles and their British brethren undermined and replaced, ushering in the era of self-contained rock bands that never left. Just put “She Loves You” up against “Spanish Harlem”; “I Want to Hold Your Hand” against “Up on the Roof”; “Please Please Me” against “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.”

It’s as Allison Anders, the director of the film “Grace of My Heart” that is about the Brill Building Sound – told me recently: “They produced the only real standards as far as I’m concerned for the rock ‘n’ roll generation.”


I’m not alone in this slow reevaluation. Even in Greil Marcus’ latest book on Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone,” the writer who consistently makes the greatest case for Dylan’s greatness as a revolutionary musical force includes this amazing footnote about Brill Building writing:

“…(It) stands as one of the truest achievements of postwar pop music. Dylan more than anyone ended their careers as songwriters.”

I’m not even sure how long Dylan’s idiosyncratic wordplay, so wrapped in his own youthful curly-headed mythos, will outlive him. But there’ll always be a place for the Drifters’ “This Magic Moment” or Gene Pitney’s “I’m Gonna Be Strong” – two stalwarts of the Brill Building Sound.

When I think of the enduring quality of this music, I think especially of the ballads that were so wispy, melancholy and ruminative. (There were also plenty of Brill Building rockers that were fun in their own right if not classics for the ages, especially those recorded by the “girl groups” of the era.) But these ballads were for and by teenagers and young adults, and they were thought-provoking and literate and well-crafted.

At their best, especially in the work of the slightly older Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the songs had dramatic narratives that expressed the rare, mature quality of regret as well as affection. When romantic, they revealed secrets rather than hurled clichés – “Don’t Make Me Over” for Dionne Warwick, “Mexican Divorce” for the Drifters, “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa” for Gene Pitney, “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” for Tommy Hunt.

And they could be political, too. While a little late in the curve, Mann and Weil wrote some sparkling Dylan-influenced social-protest songs, like the Vogues’ “Magic Town” and Jody Miller’s “Home of the Brave” and the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” And one of their earlier songs, the Drifters’ “On Broadway,” is as much a masterpiece of urban sadness as is an Edward Hopper painting.

“I really liked folk singers like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie as a kid because their songs had something to say about society,” Weil says via E-mail. “I was also very into musical theater and I liked the idea of pop songs expressing ideas and being more that ‘Moon’ and ‘June’ love songs, so that awareness found its way into my lyrics.”

Not all the great songs of the era were by Brill Building or Aldon visionaries per se. Not even all were New York productions – Los Angeles played an important part and for awhile there was crossover with “The Sound of Young America” emanating from Berry Gordy’s Motown operation, especially on such sanguine, reflective Four Tops ballads as “Baby I Need Your Loving’” and “Ask the Lonely.”

But they all shared an aesthetic – an ambitious creative approach. Their sound was adventurous and full of surprisingly subtle coloration, such as string arrangements and horns as well as rumbling bass, Latin-like percussion, doo-wop memories, and female back-up singers with their gentle, dreamy “sha la la’s.” There wasn’t a fear that delicacy could be interpreted as a loss of “edge.” Delicacy was part of the edge.

Everyone involved thought they were topping him- or herself with each new hit – and they were: Singers like Ben E. King, Warwick, Pitney and the Shirelles; producers/arrangers/writers like Leiber and Stoller, Phil Spector and Luther Dixon; songwriters like the aforementioned ones plus Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry; independent labels like Atlantic, Musicor (home of George Jones, true, but also Pitney) and Scepter/Wand.

And to an extent appropriate for the optimistic times that coincided with the 1963 March on Washington and the Kennedy presidency, the music was color blind and integrationist. Most of the writers were white; many of the singers black. And the music had worldly influences. Clever productions like the Shangri-Las’ urgently spooky “Out in the Streets” and “Give Us Your Blessings,” both written by Greenwich and Barry, owed as much to “West Side Story” as Elvis, if not more.

The British Invasion and all that followed ruined the importance of such qualities in youth music. Instead, they replaced it with hero worship – and egocentricity of monstrous proportions. And we lost something profoundly valuable that we’ve never recovered.

“I’m not in total agreement it changed music for better,” says Ben E. King of the British Invasion. He was the lead singer for the Drifters on “This Magic Moment” and “Save the Last Dance For Me,” before recording as a solo artist such hits as “Spanish Harlem,” “Stand By Me” and “I (Who Have Nothing).”

“I thought they had some great writers, but so did we,” King explains. “It was certainly for the better for European groups, and to this day they’re household names – Mick Jagger on down. (But) it was not the blend of music we had going at the time, which was a mixture of music of all races – I had Latin music, R&B, two wonderful Jewish guys producing. We had wonderful human relationships in our music. But when it came from England, it was European groups playing what they assumed pop music and R&B should sound like.”

Actually, those early British groups were admirers of the Brill Building Sound – especially, oddly, the girl-group recordings. Some even had sizeable hits covering them – the Searchers with the Orlons’ ethereal “Don’t Throw Your Love Away” and Herman’s Hermits with Irma-Jean’s “I’m Into Something Good.” But in making those songs their own, they erased the past.

Billy Vera, a musician and music historian who had a huge hit in 1987 with “At This Moment,” started his career as a writer for an Aldon rival, April-Blackwood Music. (His boss was Chip Taylor, who now records folk music with Carrie Rodriguez.) He believes that era’s Brill Building Sound – primarily the silky urban soul tunes recorded by King and others – was as good as it ever got.

“I don’t know that I’d call it rock,” he says. “It was pop music, orchestral in nature. There was a maturing taking place. By the early 1960s, all these guys were bored with the simplicity of rock ‘n’ roll and wanted to do something more sophisticated. Leiber and Stoller started it with (1959’s) ‘There Goes My Baby.’ Then Bacharach and David and, before David Bob Hilliard, started making music that was more Gershwinesque but still had elements of rock ‘n’ roll and soul.”

Vera also points out that this blending of influences was happening at the same time as Top 40 radio was itself a giant blender for all kinds of pop music. Everybody was listening to everything.

“That period from 1959-1964 was when all these records were being made with great arrangements, recording techniques, and songwriting with lyrics and melodies that had more depth than rock ‘n’ roll,” Vera says. “A lot of the people who had come out of early rock ‘n’ roll were becoming grown-ups. And blacks and whites, as fans and musicians, were coming closer together.

“The British Invasion brought an end to that and that’s crucial to understanding the history of rock ‘n’ roll,” he says.

There are several reasons why this is crucial. Ever since the Beatles, rock – which until recently has dominated pop music commercially and culturally – has been about reinventing the wheel. Sooner or later, it always comes back to authenticity. The spirit of worldly pop experimentation that was a Brill Building Sound hallmark, must fight off the guardians of “roots.” Roots has come to mean music that can trace its origins directly back to the 1950s godfathers. Growth has been viewed with suspicion.

It’s like the argument in art that Jackson Pollock’s abstractions weren’t “real” because they didn’t depict anything. Never mind that they were real because they were paintings. But in art, the champions of Pollock won the argument – they were the radicals. In pop, however, the conservatives won although they thought they were the radicals because the music they championed is seen as rebellious. But it’s an immature rebellion, pure arrested development – Peter Pan’s cry of “I don’t want to grow up.”

Still, there was accomplishment in this. The black-American blues and hard R&B the Brits were reinterpreting had originally been seen as adult music the first time around. They made it youth music through the force of their flamboyant personalities and guitar-playing prowess. They also made it white.

“The only reason these kids came to be popular is they imitated what we sent over,” Ben E. King says. “They had a great look, a great promotional gimmick and you have to allow for all the songs recorded by blacks that didn’t get played in some parts of the country. So when the Beatles came over, no problem. Every state loved them, every major TV show they were on. They cut through with no problem.”

These groups also started writing their own songs, which often sounded suspiciously like the material that inspired them. That started a whole new trend that continues today – superstars who get away writing mediocre, derivative material because of who they are. As a result, there has been a dumbing-down of songwriting.

With an older producer, George Martin, at the helm, the Beatles tried to be musically sophisticated in their arrangements and recordings. And they made some breathtaking recordings. Lyrically, however, even as late in their career as “All You Need Is Love” or “Hello Goodbye,” their songs were no match for the songwriters of the Brill Building Sound.

But it didn’t matter. By that time, rock has starting to separate into different categories. And, despite the occasional Jimi Hendrix or Bob Marley, race had a lot to do with that. For awhile, there was an incredible flowering as different youth-music radio formats started to cover the expanding territory. But it’s been slowly downhill since – the best of the era’s writers and singers moved to MOR pop, singer-songwriter rock, soul or the oldies circuit.

When Richard Foos, who started Rhino Records and now owns the Shout Factory label, opened his first Los Angeles record store in 1973, much of the Brill Building Sound was out-of-print. Then-nascent rock criticism wasn’t kind to it, confusing it with the stiff, dull teen idols of the era like Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Also, some critics held it against Carole King that she had become a sensitive, very popular singer-songwriter in the 1970s. They found such well-crafted music wimpy.

“The popular theory, which can be really argued, was that there had been a slow ebb of rock ‘n’ roll and R&B during the 1961-63 period,” Foos says. “And then the Beatles come and that starts the era of self-contained bands writing their own music.”

Rhino has helped preserve the era with its reissues, such as 1998’s “The Look of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection.” “I have to say unfortunately that that music has never sold like later-1960s music or even the 1970s, even though personally I love it more,” Foos says.

Others, too, have picked up the ball – quintessential New York rockers like Paul Simon, Lou Reed and the late Joey Ramone have championed the Brill Building Sound. Carole King, too, has re-recorded her old hits of the period. Fittingly, Broadway – which inspired the young Brill Building Sound writers – has been receptive to revues based on their songs, like “Smokey Joe’s Café” (Leiber and Stoller) and “Leader of the Pack” (Greenwich and Barry). Phil Spector, too, has found a way to stay in the news – unfortunately.

Most interestingly, Anders’ 1996 film “Grace of My Heart,” which is modeled on the life of Carole King (played by Illeana Douglas), actually initiated a resurgence of interest in Bacharach. For its soundtrack, the film paired actual songwriters of the portrayed era with contemporary songsmiths. Bacharach was paired with Elvis Costello and they wrote the memorable “God Give Me Strength.” They then went on to collaborate on a well-received album.

“We created a situation where these two men could come together and create a standard,” Anders says, proudly. “We gave something back.”

We all should be giving something back to the Brill Building Sound.

(I am indebted to the following sources for material for this story: Alan Betrock’s “Girl Groups” book and the music and liner notes on the following boxed sets: “The Look of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection” (Rhino); “The Scepter Records Story” (Capricorn); “The Brill Building Sound” (Era); “The Sue Records Story” (EMI); “Phil Spector: Back to Mono (1958-1969)” (Abkco); “The Red Bird Story” (Charly).)


Ten songs:

I Just Don’t Know What to Do
Will You Still Love Me
Magic Town
Any Day Now
Spanish Harlem
That’s How Heartaches
Don’t Make Me Over
Mexsican Divorce
24 Hours From Tula
Stand By Me
Uptown
You Lost That Lvin Feelin
Human

The "Ghost Art" of Cincinnati's Public Stairways

'Ghost Art' on Cincinnati's Public Stairways
By Steven Rosen

(This originally ran in Cincinnati CityBeat, Aug. 26, 2009_

When it comes to public art, I appreciate programs like ArtWorks’ ongoing MuralWorks project (and the jobs it creates), but what I really respond to is “ghost art.”

By that, I mean public art or architecture that seems almost accidental – residue or remnants of something once present and now gone, or something mysteriously placed in the public domain for no discernible intent.


Among the latter, I was always intrigued by the poster for Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign that was glued to a boarded-up window of an old Over-the-Rhine business called Charlie’s Fine Food & Great Spirits.

Obviously the poster hadn’t been up there since 1968. Someone put it up more recently; probably even reproduced the poster and then chose this incongruous spot with no explanation. Was it a deliberate act of art? A political statement? A prank? A memorial? (Kennedy was assassinated during that Democratic primary campaign.) One will never know — the poster has now been scraped away, leaving only the ghost of its memories.

Another piece of seemingly “accidental” ghost art is along Columbia Parkway, primarily between Delta Avenue and Torrence Parkway. Last year, the city’s Transportation & Engineering Department began concreting over the “stairways to nowhere” that rose from the concrete supporting wall into the overgrown hillsides. But it left their outlines weirdly discernible through the new wall.

Decades ago, these stairs once went to houses, but as the road below developed from a patchwork of above-flood-level alternate routes for Eastern Avenue into a limited-access parkway, the city slowly bought the land and demolished the homes. But the stairs, since they were built into the retention wall, remained – a siren-like beckoning to commuters from an older Cincinnati to abandon their cars and “come on up.”

Since they served no purpose, there was little outcry when the city — in a $240,000 project primarily funded by the state — began covering up the dozen or so stairways. Crews poured backfill and topsoil into the stairwells and created concrete partitions facing the parkway. But the visible outlines of the stairways now cause a double-take. They work as outdoor sculpture.

It turns out the effect is not accidental. The city did this on purpose, putting the new partitions slightly behind the edges of the old handrails to create the outline.

“When I first came to Cincinnati 10 years ago, they were the mystery steps,” says Michael Moore, interim director of the Transportation & Engineering Department. “This sort of keeps their memory, rather than having it disappear into the concrete.

“When we do a project, we like to be sure to create a sense of history so you’re aware of the place you’re in. We thought it would be nice to remember that it used to be a habitated hillside. It’s kind of like the ghost of the steps that used to be there.”

Looking to a green future, maybe (hopefully) there will come a new day when people want to take stairs down from hillside homes — or walking paths through the hills — to board Columbia Parkway streetcars into downtown. Won’t we need those stairways once again?

Moore says, if that should happen, the rapid-transit system probably will follow a now-little-used rail line between Eastern Avenue and Columbia Parkway, and the city could build bridges over to it.

So it appears the ghost art will remain.

“I hope it rings some bells for people about what was once there,” Moore says.


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CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosen@citybeat.com

A Different Woodstock Story: Happy Traum's "Golden Bird"

Happy Traum’s "Golden Bird"
By Steven Rosen

(This originally ran Aug. 21, 2009, in SonicBoomers.com)


It is a vow of American roots music that the circle will be unbroken -- the past and present shall link up to form an ongoing, renewing folk tradition.

In an unusual way, one that tells as much about Woodstock, N.Y.'s, impact on popular music as the famous rock festival's much-ballyhooed 40th anniversary, Levon Helm continues that circle on his new album, Electric Dirt.

Helm, The Band's drummer and one of its three lead singers, is himself a living testament to musical renewal. After battling throat cancer that had left him unable to sing and in precarious health, he was able in 2007 to record the spunky, soulful Dirt Farmer, his first solo album in some 25 years -- and it won him a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.

He has already followed it up with the new Electric Dirt, featuring musicians -- including producer/guitarist Larry Campbell -- who play at his Midnight Ramble jam sessions at his Woodstock home. It has quickly moved to the top of Americana-music playlists. It is a bluesy, raucously country-rockin' record -- very much like The Band -- but there are exceptions.

One is a chillingly mournful and folkloric mountain ballad called "Golden Bird" that features Campbell on violin. It sounds as if the 69-year-old Helm is in a séance, dredging up a song he heard as a child in his native Arkansas, where his father was a music-loving cotton farmer.

But actually it's from a fellow Woodstock musician -- 71-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist Happy Traum -- and comes from a hard-to-find 1970 folk-rock album simply called Happy and Artie Traum. That record reflected the Traums' deep admiration for fellow Woodstock residents The Band. (At that time the group lived in the nearby town of West Saugerties.)

Like The Band, the Traums were helped by Bob Dylan -- a friend of Happy's from the early-1960s folk-revival days in Greenwich Village. (The Traums had grown up in the Bronx.) Happy was in a group called the New World Singers that had first recorded Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," but their label Atlantic Records reportedly found it too political. It was put out in 1963 on Folkways Records' multi-artist Broadside, Vol. 1 album, along with a duet by Traum and Dylan on "Let Me Die in My Footsteps." (In 1971, Happy dueted with Dylan on three songs on the latter's 1971 Greatest Hits Vol. 2 -- "Down in the Flood," "I Shall Be Released" and "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere.")

Happy and his wife, Jane, and their three young children had moved to Woodstock from New York City's Upper West Side in 1967. He had already written his first instruction book, Fingerpickin' Styles for Guitar, and the couple started Homespun Tapes, a now-thriving company selling music lessons on DVDs and CDs.

When Happy also decided to start performing with younger brother Artie -- who died last year of cancer -- Dylan helped book them into the Newport Folk Festival and sign with his (and The Band's) manager, Albert Grossman. And the latter got them on Capitol Records, The Band's label. On Dylan's advice, they went to Nashville to record their debut album, which featured "Golden Bird" and was produced by the Traums and Charlie Tallent with various session players.

Speaking by phone from his Woodstock home just before leaving to teach a guitar workshop in Maine, Traum recalls the reasons for the move. "Columbus Avenue, the part (of Manhattan) we were living in, had lots of junkies and winos and I had the hassle of trying to park car everyday because I was going out on gigs," he says.

"We had spent a couple summers in Woodstock, mostly at the urging of our old friend John Herald from Washington Square (music) days. And we decided, ‘Why go back?'" he continues. "There was a large migration of kids in those days from urban to rural areas, and there was a growing music community in Woodstock. So we had a lot of friends here and places to play."

"Golden Bird" came about from Happy's responses to that move-- and to his daily view of a Woodstock mountain. The song is a fable about a man killing the thing he loves -- a precious bird -- because he can't control it. It then returns to him at night as a vision of a woman, grieving over his tragic, cruel action.

"Overlook Mountain is the first peak on the easternmost side of the Catskill range, and Woodstock is nestled at the foot of the mountain," Traum says. "At the time I wrote the song, I was in a part called Byrdcliffe, the original artists' colony, so I was living on the side of that mountain. I had recently moved from New York City and I was still in awe that I had left that urban environment for a fairly bucolic one. And I loved old ballads and the stories they told, so I thought I'd make up my own."

Overall the Happy and Artie Traum album is rock-infused folk music, at times reminiscent of The Band. (Their friend Eric Kaz provides poignant harmonica throughout.) The Traums even try to sing like that group on several songs, with their rustic harmonies and yearning, pining leads. One is a rollicking tune called "Uncle Jedd Says" by a local songwriter named Billy Batson, which has a joyous sing-along chorus featuring Tracy Nelson. Another is "Going Down to See Bessie," which was indeed written by The Band's Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson.
Years later, in 1975, it was officially released on Bob Dylan and The Band's Basement Tapes, under the name "Bessie Smith."

"We learned that directly from them," Happy remembers. "The Basement Tapes hadn't come out yet and they hadn't recorded it. But they taught it to us and we made it one of our showcases. They taught it to Artie at a meeting he had with them at a local grocery store. They said, ‘We have a song we want to play for you.' We used to imitate the way Rick would sing it."

Despite the good feelings the Traums had for Woodstock (Artie lived in nearby Lake Hill), the album has an aching, melancholy feel -- present are its own tears of rage and sorrow. As the lyrics of "Golden Bird" suggest, it has intimations of sadness.

In the liner notes, Artie explains how one of the songs he wrote, "Farmers Almanac," was inspired by a fight between cops and street people on the Lower East Side, where his house "always smelled like decaying meat." He also writes: "We are all, all of us, alienated and afraid of this monstrous, billowing junk heap; music thrives on our energy, draws our hope, purges and soothes us. It is our life, but not our solution. A small part, maybe."

Happy believes two of Artie's songs on the album are particular standouts -- both minor-key, loneliness-infused takes on the West: "Rabbit's Luck" and the eerie, foreboding "The Hungry Dogs of New Mexico." The latter was inspired by a trip Artie took out West in the early 1960s, where he met a tired waitress near the Atomic Testing Grounds who asked, "How can you be so free to travel like this?"

The album didn't fare well in the marketplace despite initial red-carpet treatment from Capitol. "We went out to L.A. to meet everybody -- they flew us out and we went to the Capitol Tower and went from roof to basement meeting every PR person and every vice president," Traum says.

"They treated us like the next big thing. Then we went back to Woodstock and put the thing out and found out everyone at Capitol was fired. So the next time we went out, nobody knew who we were. By the time our next album (Double-Back, also on Capitol) came out, nobody had a clue. That was our first and pretty much only experience with a major record label. After that, we went to Rounder Records and it was much better."

By then, it was clear the Traums weren't going to be major-label culture-defining superstars. But they became comfortable Woodstock music-makers with a sturdy, devoted folk-music following.

In 1974, the Traums put out Mud Acres: Music Among Friends on Rounder, a kind of in-the-studio hootenanny of Woodstock-area friends (including Maria Muldaur, John Herald, Jim Rooney and Bill Keith) that has developed an enduring following and several sequels.

And in the 1990s, they hosted a music/variety radio show out of Albany. Besides two subsequent releases as Happy and Artie Traum, they recorded separately as well. Artie eventually moved into guitar-based jazz. Happy even put out a new version of "Golden Bird" on an obscure 1977 album, American Stranger, for Kicking Mule Records.

So when Campbell, Helm's producer, was looking for material for Electric Dirt, he thought to ask Traum -- who sees Helm in Woodstock and has played with him occasionally. The latter suggested mostly Artie's compositions. The only submission from their two long-forgotten Capitol Records releases was his own "Golden Bird."

"I just thought it was one he might respond to," Traum says. "He heard it and went right into the studio and started arranging it way they did. He got the mythology, all of the stuff he likes -- I think it just rang a bell for him. I was completely thrilled."