The House That Built Pop Music

American pop is mongrel music. Back an R & B tune with a Latin beat, add in lewd blues lyrics toned down and warmed, tack on an opera-inspired recitative about meeting the wrong guy, or a Gershwinesque string section, and you may have a hit for a week or so. That’s how songwriters in Manhattan’s Brill Building churned out the songs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and their amalgamations were so innovative that many of their disposable tunes turned out to be lasting pop gems. The raucous atmosphere in which the writers in that one legendary building worked is captured in a fascinating new book by the music writer Ken Emerson, Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era.

Emerson tells the stories of dozens of songwriters—mostly Jewish kids from Brooklyn—with plenty of insider anecdotes and original interviews. With so many people to cover, it can all get a bit tangled, but his lively writing style makes the challenge well worth it.

In 1956 Elvis Presley was in his ascendancy with the hit “Hound Dog,” originally sung by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. Before accusing Elvis of stealing from a black musician, know that the song was written by two white men, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who were, well, stealing from black musicians. Leiber, from Baltimore, and Stoller, from Long Island, were raised on big band music while surreptitiously listening to jazz, boogie-woogie, and the blues. Jerry Leiber said, “I felt black. I was, as far as I was concerned.”

Leiber and Stoller’s innovation wasn’t just insouciantly borrowing from African-Americans; it was smoothing out the raw energy of the blues and making it palatable for white audiences and lucrative for record labels. Their mix of blues and big band was so infectious that in 1957 they crafted 11 No. 1 pop-hit singles, more than anyone else that year. These included “Jailhouse Rock,” a tamer version of a blues song, “Riot in Cell Block #9.”

With those musical bona fides, they moved into the Brill Building near Times Square, then home to 90 music publishers. Leiber and Stoller turned the building into a pop mecca by cultivating writing teams that included Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, and Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield. These teams borrowed from one another unabashedly, calling this “writing sideways,” taking pieces from existing songs, speeding them up, slowing them down, smashing them back together, dropping out the bass, adding or subtracting strings—until they could defensibly call the results their own.

One of the more compelling of these characters is Doc Pomus, born Jerome Felder. He was, like many of the other Brill Building writers, raised Jewish in Brooklyn and entranced by both dance-hall music and harder stuff (Big Joe Turner was his idol). A bout of polio crippled his legs, but he would drag himself up the subway stairs to take a train to Brighton Beach to hear the “swing and sway” of the Sammy Kaye big band. His brother remembered their trips: “It was quite an ordeal. He would fall and fall.”

By the time he was 19, Felder was cutting records under the name Doc Pomus to conceal the fact that he was singing with African-Americans, but it was in black clubs that he felt most comfortable. In his journal he wrote, “To the world, a fat crippled jewish kid is a nigger—a thing—the invisible man—like Ralph Ellison says.” If the world couldn’t see him, it would hear him. He played with an astonishing array of great jazz musicians during the 1940s and started writing songs to pay the bills.

In 1956 he penned “Lonely Avenue,” a chillingly brilliant but bleak song with a thudding two-four beat, desolate instrumentation, and a hollow chorus. Its lyrics (“Now, my room has got two windows/But the sunshine never comes through”) are ostensibly about the end of a relationship. But as so often with blues songs, the overt story line is merely an entry point into a deeper sadness, in this case, Pomus’s own sadness in being trapped by his disability.

But pop music was all about teens and their soda-fountain dramas, and Felder hooked up with a teen named Mort Shuman who was dating his cousin. “Lonely Avenue” caught on with rhythm-and-blues artists after Ray Charles recorded it, but it brought Fedler little commercial success. So he and Shuman started writing for a Brill Building publisher, churning out pop tunes including “This Magic Moment,” “Save the Last Dance for Me,” and “Sweets for My Sweet.”

Collier’s magazine announced in 1957, “Never in our 180-year history has the United States been so aware of—or confused about—its teenagers.” And pop songsters directed their attention to those teens, writing about awkward young love, new cars, and school dances. The Brill Building writers borrowed elements from rock ’n’ roll but considered themselves heirs to Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. They adored Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, and it inspired songs like Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s “Up on the Roof” and Wiel and Mann’s “Uptown.” The influence showed up in what Doc Pomus dubbed “Jewish Latin,” characterized by the baion beat of the Drifters’ “This Magic Moment” and the flamenco guitar in “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.”

In the early 1960s some of the smaller publishers started selling out to larger labels. The death knell came in the mid-1960s, with the arrival of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, self-sufficient musicians who wrote their own songs and penned more mature lyrics. In 1965 Dylan plugged in and the Beatles drew a record crowd at Shea Stadium. Rubber Soul, with Lennon’s eerie “Norwegian Wood,” was released that year. Emerson writes, “By 1969 the songwriting community that Leiber and Stoller had helped foster a dozen years earlier had grown up, fallen apart, and dispersed.”

Never one for humility, Dylan declared “Tin Pan Alley is gone. I put an end to it.” But he didn’t really. The song most often broadcast on American radio is Weil and Mann’s “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” and Brill Building tunes continue to be sampled and recycled and loved. Groups like Destiny’s Child owe part of their sound to those Brill Building confections the Shangri-Las and the Shirelles—and who can imagine that, say, the inane “Let Me Cater To You,” an anthem to female subservience, will have a fraction of the shelf life of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.