Forecasting a Violent Reprisal on the Home Front: The Weathermen, the US’s Own Home-grown Proto-Terrorists

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Politics, Popular Culture, Regional History, Society & Culture

I remember where I first heard about the Weatherman, or as they later came to be called, the Weather Underground (Organisation). Some time during the 1970s I was thumbing through the pages of the 1973-74 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia❈ and came across an entry on this oddly named group subsumed under the section on “Ideas and Beliefs”…the meteorological sounding name triggered my curiosity. As the Pears editor noted of the name: a “rather incongruous name for the most radical and volatile of the many groups making up the so-called ‘underground’ in the United States of America“⊡.

What most struck the editor about the phenomenon was that “the Weathermen appear(ed) to be largely drawn from the highly intelligent and well-educated strata…well-to-do, academic backgrounds”, something Pears opined to be “sinister and ominous” (a hint toward class betrayal perhaps?). The entry goes on to explore a classic conspiracy theory, the “fantastic speculation, widely held in America” that “the Weathermen are in reality financed and backed by the country’s extreme right—as a means of discrediting in the public eye the slow but steady move toward socialism that seems to be developing there”(?!?). The Pears writer adds a coy reference to one of the leaders of the group (unnamed), “an attractive and dynamic woman university lecturer (who in 1970) was placed on the FBI’s notorious ‘most wanted criminals’ list”✥.

(Source: Yale University)

The origins of the Weather Underground lie in the tumultuous politics of Sixties America—the emergence of the “New Left” and the “Counterculture”, the struggle for civil rights and the growing anti-war movement of those disaffected by the growing catastrophe of Vietnam. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had assumed the mantle of leadership of the “youth rebellion” in America and of the anti-war movement. The Weathermen, dissatisfied with the SDS’s limited, reformist approach to curing the ills of modern capitalist society (with its emphasis on disruption and non-violent student demonstrations), split off from the SDS, who they labelled “movement creeps”, in 1969. After the Chicago “Days of Rage” riot, the Weathermen determined on a new, direct and revolutionary approach to changing a society that they avowed hatred for.

Bombed interior of Capitol (Wash DC) (Photo: Washington Post) 🔻

1970 was the year that domestic terrorism embarked on a rapid upward trajectory in the US. The catalyst for the Weathermen adopting a more extreme line was Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and the Kent State student murders. The fringe policos went underground and turned ‘outlaws’. “Declaring war on the United States”✪, the network operating in small clandestine cells launched a series of bomb attacks on targeted sites—police stations, court houses, military installations, banks, the Capitol and Pentagon buildings in Washington DC, etc. Weather Underground attached the tag-line “bringing the war back home” to this serious switch of tactics.

1971, the assault on the “Amerikan war machine” continues

The following year brought no let-up by the Weather arsonists and incendiaries. The International Association of Chiefs of Police declared 1971 the worst year for bombings in US history. Despite causing such upheaval, the Weathermen failed abjectly to achieve any of their avowed aims [Daniels, Stuart. “The Weathermen.” Government and Opposition, vol. 9, no. 4, 1974, pp.430-459. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44482282. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020].

A giant fail

The Weather faction (WUO) failed for a multiplicity of reasons fundamentally arising out of a muddled understanding of how to effectively use political discontent to build a mass movement. The Weathermen aspired to be the revolutionary vanguard to lead the revolution that overthrew US imperialism and capitalist society. Yet it laid none of the groundwork necessary to achieve it! WUO established no popular support base for its leadership and it stayed numerically small, a “Prairie Fire” that failed to ignite!₪

Finally, in 1974, the folly of this omission was recognised within Weather and some members tried to re-orient the organisation to a policy focused on wooing the American working class. The hardliners in WUO however resisted and predictably clung to the old guerrilla war tactics, with the result of a splintering and further weakening of Weather [‘How the Weather Underground Failed at Revolution and Still Changed the World’, (Arthur M Eckstein), Time, (02-Nov-2016), http://time.com].

Rather than the Weathermen’s actions and tactics leading to a crystallisation of the (new) left in America as a cohesive force, its recourse to the nihilism of violence, the pattern of random bombings, alienated it from other sections of the far left such as SDS (Daniels). The greatest damage of the group’s bombings in fact was a self-inflicted one, when three of the Weathermen accidentally blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970⊕.

🔺 Scene of the WUO terrorists’ backfiring bomb (Source: Bettmann/Getty Images)

The middle-class dilemma

The Weathermen were essentially middle-class kids who took inspiration from grass-roots radicals and authentic working class militants like the Black Panthers. Therefore, they knew that to be taken seriously they needed to lose the bourgeois tag, to ‘declass’ themselves (to use Michael Miles’ term). Hodgdon has suggested that they were motivated partly by the “guilt arising from members’ acute consciousness of their own white privilege” [Hodgdon, Tim. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 144–146. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41887583. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020]. The outcome was a resort to high focus violence by WUO which it equated with the demonstration of revolutionary commitment. Ultimately, violence became a habitual self-indulgence for the Weathermen. Fascinated with the idea of terrorism per se, their actions became more anarchic and nihilistic and only served to further isolate them from Middle America (Daniels).

Weather logo 🔺

A junket of romance and fantasy

Students of the WUO phenomena have noted how remarkably detached the group was from the realities of contemporary USA. Exhibiting a romantic view of Third World Liberation Movements, importing the urban-guerrilla tactics of the Tupamoros of Uruguay, of whom the Weathermen were only ever pale imitations. For ideological underpinnings, the Weathermen cherrypicked from Marxist political theory (Mao, Guevara, Marighella, Debray, etc) to forge a blueprint for extreme militant action. The often immature and at times infantile Weather members revelled in their status as deviants in society…and in their notoriety as politicised “bad-boy rock stars” of crime. Clearly, more than a few of the members gained a huge thrill from being publicly portrayed as fugitives, enemies of the state [‘”Prairie Fire” Memories’, (Jonah Raskin), Tablet, 18-Jul-2019, www.tabletmag.com].

🔺 The character “Mark Slackmeyer” in Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ comic is based on Weatherman Mark Rudd

Their ready resort to acts of violence was one manifestation of this, as was their indulgence in drug-taking (wholeheartedly embracing LSD and ‘grass’) and “free love” as integral to what they saw as liberating themselves from the strictures of a rigid and corrupt society (Daniels).

PostScript: Weather Underground, fade to black

Having failed to make the slightest dint on the fortress of the American political and economic elite, the Weathermen reduced their bombing acts after 1971 and continued to scale back through the rest of the seventies. The Weather Underground lingered on for several years before eventually petering out. This however did not stop the FBI from pursuing the home-grown terrorists long after they had ceased to be active. As Eckstein noted, the FBI’s responses to the Weather phenomena had caused the Bureau embarrassment. The FBI, the nation’s chief law enforcement organisation, continued to get them wrong…initially they underestimated Weather’s seriousness as a hostile element, then they overestimated its effectiveness. The FBI persisted with a misreading of their strength, thinking there were around 1,000 Weathermen guerrillas at large in the US, overstating the reality by a factor of ten. The FBI also illegally botched the evidence against the group so none of the Weathermen could be prosecuted for conspiring to bomb government buildings [‘The Americans who declared war on their country’, (Mark Honigsbaum), The Guardian, (21-Sep-2003), www.theguardian.com ; Eckstein, Time; ‘Bad Moon Rising’, AM Eckstein, www.yalebooks.yale.edu].

⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉

❈ an annual British publication (first published 1897, now discontinued), a one-volume compendium of general and specialised knowledge in a select number of different fields

⊡ the original name, ‘Weatherman’, was taken from the lyric of a 1960s Bob Dylan song

✥ Bernadine Dohrn – who with Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones, Trevor Robbins, Kathy Boudin, Karen Ashley, Howie Machtinger and John Jacobs, founded the Weathermen. Jonah Raskin points out that a significant number of the members were, like him, Jewish (Raskin). Dohrn also headed up a Women’s Brigade within WUO

✪ a ‘symbolic’ war as Todd Gitlin described it

₪ Prairie Fire was the name of WUO’s 1976 published political statement, and a metaphor that the organisation was fond of using (eg, “a single spark can start a prairie fire”)

⊕ the three WUO bomb assemblers were the only victims of Weathermen bomb explosions as the group always forewarned the target locations so that humans could be evacuated from the spot in time

Work of “The Devil”, a Reference Compendium of Unconventional Wisdom for Cynics in the Progressive Era

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

The World According to Bierce

Ambrose Bierce, American short story writer, man of letters, journalist and civil war (Union side) veteran, is best known for his unorthodox lexicon, The Devil’s Dictionary, a humorous, satirical and very personal take on a selection of words in the English language. The dictionary was compiled by Bierce over three decades, being initially published in instalments in various newspapers and magazines. Eventually the collection was published in book form, first as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906 and then as The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911, two years before Bierce’s never satisfactorily-explained disappearance in Chihuahua, Mexico, where the journalist was visiting to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution.

Highly influential literary critic of the first half of the 20th century, HL Mencken, heaped lavish almost doting praise on The Devil’s Dictionary… “the true masterpiece of the one genuine wit that These States have ever seen“…”some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language“…”some of the most devastating epigrams ever written“.⇑ First (1911) edition of the Dictionary

დ~დ~დ დ~დ~დ დ~დ~დ

Cynicism and satire provide the backbones of Bierce’s provocative dictionary. So, an interesting place to start looking is how he handles these terms – the words ‘satire’, ‘cynic’ and ‘dictionary’ themselves. Despite being fully versed in the craft himself, Bierce views the practitioner of cynicism less than favourably.

Cynic: A blackguard❅ who sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be (which presumably is the definition of an optimism۞).

Satire: An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness✫.

Dictionary: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.

Bierce goes on to add with tongue firmly planted in his cheek that his dictionary, however, is “a most useful work”.

But a cynic Bierce certainly is. At one point he sweepingly declares, in the blanket fashion that is his trademark, that “all are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher” (in which case, what would Bierce have made of Freud and the “dark art” of psychotherapy!?!). This perception of the author reminds me to some extent of the distinction often made between a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is poor (and is labelled insane), and a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is wealthy (labelled merely eccentric).

Romance and true love falls by the wayside with Bierce’s cynic always hovering around ground level:

Love: A temporary insanity cured by marriage.

Politics is even more fertile ground for Biercian cynicism…even the highest office in the land is not spared. With characteristic directness, there is:

President: The greased pig in the field game of American politics.

Senate: A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.

Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.

And of course, to Bierce, ‘capital’ (ie, the capital) is defined as “the seat of misgovernment”.

The contemporary power politics of the day is very entrenched in Bierce’s cynic’s consciousness:

Cannon: an instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

In a similar vein Bierce gives recognition to the tradition of his nation’s imperialistic ambitions in possibly the most quoted and most acute of Bierce’s definitions:

War: God’s way of teaching Americans geography⬲.

Bierce’s entries can go off on a tangent☒, often making extensive use of quotations from “eminent poets” to underscore his definitions (Father G Jape, SJ, is a much relied upon prop for Bierce). Sometimes this involves recourse to wordy anecdotes and phrases. In contrast to lengthy descriptors, some Devil’s Dictionary‘s entries are succinctly on the mark, some are absolute poetic corkers:

Absent: Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction.

Erudition: Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Envy: Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.

Fib: A lie that has not cut its teeth.

Martyr: One who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired death.

Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.

And even more succinctly summarised is:

Hope: Desire and expectation rolled into one.

Some of Bierce’s ‘opinions’ veiled as definitions are little more than whimsical nonsenses or clever wordplays:

Incumbent: A person of the liveliest interest to the outcumbents.

Harbor: A place where ships taking shelter from stores are exposed to the fury of the customs.

The Devil’s Dictionary dishes up irony in spades, repeatedly turning the mirror back on the reader:

Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

Bierce’s lexicon is strewn with idiosyncratic elements, one is a recurring motif of robbers and theft, regularly he describes a situation where someone’s hands are in someone else’s pockets:

Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Bierce is often lauded for his humanist perspective of the world…the major organised religions do not escape his critical eye:

Religions are “conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises”

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

He can be irreverent – “Christians and camels both receive their burdens kneeling”.

The Dictionary dishes up a smorgasbord of satirical, ironic and often bitter definitions of the world as seen by Ambrose Bierce (one of the acerbic writer’s nicknames was “Bitter Bierce”). But Bierce is of course a creature of his time with all the glaring faults and prejudices of the 19th century white man’s mindset. So, through the satire and cynicism we witness the less savoury traits and predisposition of the lexicographer. Casual assumptions of racism and misogyny run through the pages of The Devil’s Dictionary.

 Witch: A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.

Widows are depicted as “pathetic creatures”, whereas wives are dismissed as merely “bitter halves” (big surprise: Bierce was separated from his own wife). On occasions he crosses the line that even he should not have ventured, such as advocating or at the very least implying a violent impulse towards the female sex:

Bang: The arrangement of a woman’s hair which suggests the thought of shooting her.

The dreaded ‘N’ word is wheeled out in the cause superior of cynicism:

African: A nigger who votes our way.

And there is more than a hint of a general misanthropic disposition emerging from the pages of the Dictionary:

Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.

Marriage is the union of “two slaves”.

AB’s miscellany of hobby horses

Politicians and philosophers are on Bierce’s “hit list”, as are lawyers who get a predictable assessment:

Lawyer: One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

Liar: A lawyer with a roving commission.

Historians, in The Devil’s Dictionary are reduced to “broad-gauge gossips”, and ‘history’ is summarily pigeonholed as “mostly false (and) about unimportant events”.

Although he doesn’t specifically give medical students a definition entry, his regular references to them through the book might prompt one to conclude that their single defining feature is that of “grave-robbers”∞.

Places like New York City and specifically Wall Street are “dens of iniquity”, the sort of Biblical association Bierce employs to those things or entities representing (in his eyes) absolute evil.

Bierce’s idiosyncratic designation of ‘happiness’, as “an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another” dovetails neatly to the definition of the German term Schadenfreude (substituting the word ‘perverse’ for ‘agreeable’ perhaps).

Bierce’s dictionary is also prone to outbursts of elitism – such as:

Laziness: Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.

Idiot: A member of a large and powerful tribe✪ whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling (an ‘idiotocracy’ perhaps).

EndNote: Bierce’s cold trail
The mysterious disappearance of Bierce has fascinated interested parties for the hundred plus years since the author vanished in Mexico. Speculation has been wildly unrestrained and rampant as to the writer’s supposed end (eg, he hooked up with Mexican bandit leader Pancho Villa and he was killed by Federal troops, or by rebels, or by his own hand or by Villa himself). Novelists, playwrights and filmmakers have all had a go at unravelling the mystery, but the reality is that no one really knows what happened to Bierce [‘The Death of Bierce’, The Ambrose Bierce Appreciation Society, www.biercephile.com].

👿

⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝

❅ Bierce defines ‘blackguard’ as an “inverted gentleman”, like a box of cherries that displays the fine ones on top but with the box “opened on the wrong side”

۞ except that Bierce’s ‘optimist’ is “a pessimist (who) applied to God for relief”

✫ obsolete or not, it doesn’t stop AB from indulging in the device

⬲ it is not universally accepted that this most famous of Bierce-isms originated with Bierce himself, see for instance “The Ambrose Bierce Site”, www.donswain.com

☒ for example see the entry for ‘story’

∞ maybe overstated but Bierce was not fabricating a connection – “body snatching” for medical education was a very real and very lucrative activity at the time

✪ Bierce tended to view different societal groups as tribal entities

A Near Miss in Tokyo: The Would-Be Assassination of a Hollywood Screen Icon

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Military history, National politics, Performing arts, Popular Culture

One of the many enduring urban myths that used to float around about celebrated Hollywood actor and director Charlie Chaplin was that he once entered a “Charlie Chaplin Look-alike Contest” – and lost! [‘Charlie Chaplin allegedly entered a Chaplin look-alike contest and lost’, (Domagoj Valjak), The Vintage News, 05-Jan-2017, www.thevintagenews.com].

Given the gravity of the Hollywood silent star’s experiences on a 1932 visit to Japan – a close brush with mortality – the “Little Tramp’ may have wished in hindsight that he was similarly unrecognisable on that particular perilous occasion in Tokyo.

This bizarre as it sounds episode took place during a heightened period of political tensions in Depression-hit Japan. The incumbent Japanese prime minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, a fan of Chaplin, invited him to Japan. Unfortunately, this occurred at a time that certain far-right cells in the Japanese military were plotting to assassinate PM Inukai and cause an international incident.

⇣PM InukaiThe group of young reactionary officers from the Japanese Imperial Navy – including Kiyoshi Koga, one of the ringleaders – sensed an opportunity in Chaplin’s impending visit to double their intended impact (chaos, anxiety and upheaval within mainstream Nihonjin society). The conspirators’❈ purpose was straightforward – to weaken the fabric of Japanese democracy and the rule of law culminating in the supplanting of the status quo civilian national government by a military one [‘May 15 Incident’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Why Chaplin?

At his trial Koga, responding to the prosecutor’s question, explained why the plan was to include Chaplin in the ‘hit’: “Chaplin is a popular figure in the United States and the darling of the capitalist class. We believed that killing him would cause a war with America, and thus we could kill two birds with a single stone” [‘No laughing matter’, (Shibley Nabhan), The Japan Times, 15-May-2005, www.japantimes.co.jp].

Why Inukai?

The perpetrators’ intent was to railroad the civilian regime in Japan, but Inukai had especially earned the ire of the clique because of his opposition to the military interventions in Manchuria and elsewhere, and it’s manipulation of the decision-making functions in the kyabinetto (キャビネット) (Japanese cabinet). The centre-right politician was planning to negotiate the Manchurian situation with the Chinese government and halt all further Japanese military activities in China – all anathema to the ultra-right militarists [‘Inukai Tsuyoshi, Prime Minister of Japan’, Britannia, www.britannia.com].

The coup attempt

Eleven young naval officers were chosen to carry out the “double strike” (known as the May 15 Incident or the ‘5.15 Incident’). They were thwarted from completing their assignment of taking out the second of their targets, owing to Charlie Chaplin’s own sudden about-face…once in Tokyo the film star lost interest in attending the reception to be held in his honour at the Japanese PM’s official residence and skipped it, instead he went to a sumo wrestling match with Inukai’s son (known as ‘Inukai Ken’), a pastime much more to his liking – this 11th hour change of mind probably saved the Hollywood cinema icon’s life!

The assassins on arrival at the prime minister’s residence or Sōri Kōtei (総理公邸)◙ (which was alarmingly short on security) duly liquidated incumbent PM Inukai as planned. The cadre of ultra-right extremists rounded out the night of terror by attacking the residence of the head of the Rikken Seiyūkai Party and tossing grenades into the Mitsubishi Bank’s Tokyo headquarters.

Chaplin meeting with the mayor of Tokyo on his trip ⇣

The Aftermath

The ensuing trial of the perpetrators was marked by a wave of public sympathy for the accused✙. Many believed that the young assassins’ actions admirably embodied the nativist Yamato (大和) spirit of Japan [‘May 15 Incident’, loc.cit.]. In such a politically charged environment, the assassins were handed extremely light sentences. The incident and its feeble handling by the establishment served to encourage conservative elements of the military to further excesses, eg, the February 26 Incident (1936), a failed putsch by a radical faction of the army with the same aim of installing a military government in Japan.

The developments in Japan in the 1930s, the isolated violent incidents by maverick cadres within the military and the incursions into Manchuria and beyond, set Japan on a path to the eventual dissolution of all political parties and the establishment of a military junta in 1940, and thus on a path to war.

Footnote: Chaplin, much later, from the sanctity of his memoirs, wrote light-heartedly of the incident: “I can imagine the assassins having carried out their plan, then discovering that I was not an American, but an Englishman – ‘Oh, so sorry!'” [Nabhan, loc.cit.].

PostScript: Japan, a dangerous environment for politicians

Assassination has been a constant in Japanese politics, a recurring feature in the nation’s political landscape. In the same year as Inukai was shot, there were two other political assassinations in Japan perpetrated by the League of Blood (the casualties a former finance minister and the head of the Mitsui Group corporation). The victims of extremist fringe violence in Japan include prime ministers or former prime ministers Prince Itō, Hara Takashi and Viscounts Saitō Makoto and Takahashi Korekiyo (these last two assassinated in the February 26 Incident). The pattern continued into the postwar era…two Japanese politicians were killed in 1960, and again in the 2000s some provincial politicians have been assassinated (these most recent killings have however tended to be the work of yakuza crime organisations).

┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳┳

❈ comprising the naval officers’ cell, some cadets of the Japanese Imperial Army and civilian members of the ultra-nationalist League of Blood

◙ in 2013 Shinzō Abe after regaining the prime ministership refused to move into the same presidential residence that Inukai was assassinated in, though he denied he was motivated by superstition [‘Japanese prime minister fails to move back into ‘haunted’ residence’, (Justin McCurry), The Guardian, 19-Aug-2013, www.theguardian.com]

✙ 350,000 signatures in blood were received, petitioning the court for lenient sentences for the eleven

New York’s Seminal Brill Building: 1960s America’s Pop Music Factory

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Leisure activities, Memorabilia, Music history, Performing arts, Popular Culture, Social History

(Photo: https://nypost.com)

The Brill Building at 1619 Broadway in Midtown New York City, architecturally, has few distinguishing features to set it apart from most any other homogeneous looking commercial medium high-rise building in the “Big Apple” (save for a rather dazzlingly decorative archway entrance). But for a period from the end of the Fifties to the late Sixties it was the fulcrum (if not quite the epicentre) of innovative and groundbreaking Rock and Pop music-making in the USA.

The young professionals are in the Building!
The collaborative and creative energies of the Brill Building produced a conducive environment for young professional songwriters of the period to work with music producers to create highly productively musical outcomes. So there were song-writing teams that emerged around 1960 (often they were couples) – (Carole) King and (Gerry) Goffin, (Barry) Mann and (Cynthia) Weil, (Jeff) Barry and (Ellie) Greenwich – who linked up successfully with young producers like “wonder-kid” Phil Spector※ [‘The Brill Building: Assembly-Line Pop’, (Reebee Garofalo), Encyclopaedia Britannia, www.encyclopaediabritannia.com].

⬆ Kirshner, King & Goffin

But the Brill Building’s genesis as a revolutionary force in 1960s US pop music actually started in a building across the road – at 1650 Broadway. Here in 1958 “pop entrepreneur” Don Kirshner and musician Al Nevins formed Aldon Music✳. Aldon’s reading of the popular music zeitgeist of the day was that rock and roll’s original impact had dissipated and somewhat lost its way. Kirshner’s remedy was “to take its energies and reapply the old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley❁ disciplines to the craft and professionalism of making hits for the youth market” [Inglis, Ian. “‘Some Kind of Wonderful’: The Creative Legacy of the Brill Building.” American Music, vol. 21, no. 2, 2003, pp. 214–235. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3250565]. Kirshner put together a stable of aspiring young songwriters, including Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, as well as Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka.

1619 + 1650 = the Brill Building style
The term “Brill Building” in the musical context doesn’t confine itself exclusively just to that one building…Brill Building as a descriptor for the achievements in NYC pop and rock creativity of the day is an omnibus reference for what was happening at both addresses, 1619 and 1650 Broadway, New York.

The pioneers of the new professionalism that was to become labelled as “Brill Building” were probably the song-writing team of Leiber and Stoller (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) who had earlier written for Elvis Presley, started to write hits for the Drifters from the late 50s that mark the starting-off point for Brill [Garofalo, loc.cit.]. A new wave of songwriters began to etch out pop songs from within the walls of 1650 Broadway and 1619 Broadway (the Brill Building adopted Aldon’s ‘hothouse’ style of songwriting from youthful collaborators with a creative overlap between the two addresses)✥ [Inglis, op.cit.].

Distinguishing features of Brill Building music and music-makers
Kirshner’s writing staff at 1650 Broadway were not only dedicated professionals, they were remarkably youthful…the eighteen songwriters Kirshner had in his employ in 1961 (roughly equally male and female) were aged between 19 and 26, a clear departure from the status quo ante of “middle-age men churning out novelty songs” [ibid.]. This contemporary generation of songwriters, not much older than their target audience, grasped the idiom of teenagers and wrote exclusively for the youth of the 1960s [Garofalo, loc.cit.]♕.

Other composer/lyricist teams to thrive in the environment of the Brill Building included Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (who later worked with Kirshner and the Monkees) and the extraordinarily prolific hit-making duo of Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

The gender equality between songwriters achieved at Brill, brought female pop and rock songwriters like King, Weil and Greenwich to the fore, correlating with the rise of the girl groups of the early 60s… these female writers wrote hits for the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons, the Ronettes and the like [Inglis, op.cit.]✪.

⬇ The Ronettes: “Big hair” sound!

‘Brill’ place, ‘Brill’ music?
Recollections of the songwriters’ working conditions at the Brill Building doesn’t suggest an ideal environment to inspire the creation of Top 40 hits: writers were assigned their “respective cubby holes” (Carole King), “a tiny cubicle the size of a closet”…”no window or anything” …(an upright) “piano and a chair” …”we’d go in and write songs all day” (Barry Mann, ibid.). The creators of pop and rock worked in an assembly line fashion in something akin to a standard nine-to-five office job [Garofalo, loc.cit.]. Kirshner would play one young writing team off against another to enhance their productivity [Sociology of Rock, Simon Frith (1978)].

The hit factory
And yet despite these strictures it somehow worked! The songwriting team did come up with “teenage drivel” from time to time, but collectively, the youthful penners of contemporary Sixties song generated a steady series of musical hits for a Pop-crazy world! Fusing the urgency of R & B with “the brightness of mainstream pop” melodies, Goffin and King, Greenfield and Sedaka and the other B.B. star writing teams came up with perennial pop classics like “Will you Love me Tomorrow?”, “Calendar Girl”, “Leader of the Pack” and the much revered “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” [ibid.].

A vertical integration of the pop music biz on a micro-scale
The “B.B. factory” was good at matching artists to appropriate material. By 1962 the Brill Building contained 165 separate music businesses. This meant a B.B. musician “could find a publisher and printer, cut a demo, promote the record and cut a deal with radio promoters, all within this one building”, Garofalo, loc.cit.; ‘The Brill Building’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Volume 8: Genres: North, (Edited by John Shepherd, David Horn), 2013, www.books.google.com.au]

Time call on the Brill Building
By the mid to late 1960s the B.B. music line was losing its energy. A new creative force was rapidly filling its void – the rise of the singer-songwriter, heralding a new era of artists who wrote their own material. The new wave led by the phenomenal global success of the Beatles (the unsurpassed potency of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting duo) and the guru-like acclaim afforded Bob Dylan, fairly swiftly relegated the Brill Building writers to the edges of pop music relevance [Garofalo, loc.cit.].

 Footnote: A Brill Building ‘sound?’
The Brill Building style of songs drew inspiration from diverse strands of earlier music – R & B (rhythm and blues), Latin, jazz and African-American gospel. The result was often referred to as the “Brill Building sound” but there actually wasn’t a specific or distinctive sound at all. The only similarities between the Brill ‘products’ was in the recurring themes and components in the song lyrics (might be described as “First World problems” seen through the eyes of 60s American youth) [‘The Brill Building pioneered assembly line pop music but left a legacy of hits’, (Troy Lennon), The Daily Telegraph, 13-Sep-2017, www.dailytelegraph.com.au]; Inglis, op.cit.].

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※ Spector was both a collaborator with the Brill songwriters and a customer of their compositions

✳ described by Ian Inglis as “a crucial moment in the development of Brill Building’s pop sensibilities”

❁ Tin Pan Alley was a loose collection of composers, lyricists and music publishers based in NYC who dominated the industry for several decades through the first half of the 20th century (Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Sammy Cahn, Hammerstein and Rodgers and many more)

✥ although two of the mainstays of the Brill team, Goffin and King, never actually worked in the Brill Building, producing their entire creative output in the period over at Aldon Music (they did however sell some of their compositions through the Brill Building)

♕ many of the Brill writing alumni went on to be highly successful performers in their own right – top of the totem industry names like Neil Diamond, Gene Pitney, Paul Anka and Paul Simon

✪ another interesting juxtaposition emerging from the Brill Building music factory was the contrast between writer and artist – the songwriters were all white and mostly Jewish, writing largely for emerging black girl groups (Inglis)