[Via delanceyplace.com ]

In today’s excerpt - between 1959 and 1964, the most prolific incubator for new teenage music in America was the Brill Building in New York City, which launched the careers of such legendary songwriters (and later performers) as Carole King, Neil Diamond and Bobby Darin:

“The Brill Building, located at 1619 Broadway in the heart of New York’s music district, is in outward ap­pearance indistinguishable from a thousand other old office buildings in midtown Manhattan. Yet since the late Fifties, its name has been synonymous with an approach to rock songwriting that has changed the course of the music. The fame of the Brill Building is largely due to Aldon Music, a music publishing firm actually located across the street….

“Rock & roll had been growing steadily in popular­ity for several years, and its audience’s tastes were becoming possible to define, if not always to predict; the established music industry, at first baffled by rock & roll, was now searching for means to manipulate it, to make it fit into the old rules they under­stood. No larger gap could be imagined than that between the sophisticated cocktail music of Tin Pan Alley and the rude street noise of rock & roll, yet it was this very gap that [Aldon founders] Al Nevins and Don Kirshner set out to bridge. Initially, they were merely responding to the overwhelming demand for songs by the thousands of young groups and singers now clogging the stu­dios. Most of these performers were recording either old standards or thoroughly inadequate original ma­terial - for it was very rare in those days for rock & roll artists to write decent material of their own. …

“Kirshner’s goal was to supply songs for this new market, songs that would meet the highest stan­dards of professionalism while still appealing to a teenage audience. He and Nevins gathered together the best of New York’s young writers, some now forgotten, others destined for lasting popularity. Among Aldon’s first group of then-un­knowns were Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Bobby Darin, Neil Diamond, Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka. Aldon’s clients were chiefly the large record labels like Columbia, Atlantic, RCA and ABC, which required songs of high quality in great quantity. On the whole, it was Aldon’s success in setting a new standard of quality in rock songwriting that ensured the firm’s preemi­nence. … Discounting small pockets of creativity in New Orleans and Detroit, the Brill Building accounted for much of the best rock popu­lar between 1959 and 1964. …

“The most typical and in many respects the premier performer of the Aldon stable was Carole King, raised in the same Brooklyn neighborhood as Sedaka and Greenfield. She made a few solo records in the late Fifties, including an answer to Sedaka’s ‘Oh! Carol.’ But it was in part­nership with Gerry Goffin, under the tutelage of Nevins and Kirshner, that she emerged as a composer - a career so successful that her own sing­ing was pushed into the background for more than a decade. Few of her fans are aware of the number of hits she was responsible for: In the space of five years, more than a hundred substantial singles, and at least a hundred more that didn’t quite make it. The Goffin-King team was probably the most prolific and popular of its era.

“King composed melodies as Sedaka did: under constant pressure to turn out a constant stream of hits. But with the addition of Goffin’s lyrics. King evolved a uniquely individual style. Goffin dealt with teenage problems and situations in a mature and emotionally believable manner. His lyrics were literate without being as literary as Greenfield’s. Consider ‘Up on the Roof,’ in every way a remark­able pop song for 1962:

When this old world starts getting me down

And people are just too much for me to take

I climb way up to the top of the stairs

And all my cares just drift right into space …

“From the internal rhyme of ‘stairs’ and ‘cares’ to the image of ascending from the street to the stars by way of an apartment staircase, it’s first-rate, sophis­ticated writing, unmarred by Greenfield’s over­wrought virtuosity. Goffin was able to combine fantasy and realism successfully on ‘Halfway to Paradise,’ the powerful ‘Hey, Girl,’ and Goffin and King’s all-time classic, ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow,’ their first hit to­gether and an astonishingly honest (for 1960) re­statement of the old ‘will you still respect me in the morning’ theme.”

Author: Brill article by Greg Shaw; book edited by Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke, with Holly George-Warren; original editor Jim Miller Title: The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll Publisher: Random House Date: Copyright 1992 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.; Copyright 1976, 1980 by Rolling Stone Press Pages: 143-146

The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music by Rolling Stone Magazine by Random House Paperback ~ Release Date: 1992-11-10