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

(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)