Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era

by Ken Emerson

Always Magic in the Air is a family portrait of fourteen remarkable young songwriters who, huddled in midtown Manhattan’s Brill Building and in 1650 Broadway during the late 1950s and early ’60s, crafted rock ’n’ roll’s first entries in the Great American Songbook—classics like Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” Dionne Warwick’s “Walk on By,” the Crystals’ “Uptown,” the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich melded black, white, and Latino sounds before multiculturalism became a concept, integrated audiences before America desegregated its schools, and brought a new social consciousness to pop music.

Evoking a period when fear and frivolity, sputniks and hula-hoops simultaneously girdled the globe, Ken Emerson—author of the acclaimed Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture—describes the world that made these songwriters, the world they in turn made in their music, and the impact on their careers, partnerships, and marriages when the Beatles, Dylan, and drugs ripped those worlds asunder. The stories behind their songs make the “golden oldies” we take for granted sound brand new and more moving and eloquent than we ever suspected.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Pop Culture, Rock N Roll, Biography

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had this book for years, but it took the passing of Ellie Greenwich (part of the songwriting team responsible for such classic, iconic pop songs as "Be My Baby" and "Leader of the Pack") this week to make me finally read it. Emerson's prose is a little dry, but for anyone with an interest in this musical era, the story and the characters are compelling. Even those of us who pride ourselves on knowing that Burt Bacharach wasn't just called into being in the late nineties by Elvis Costello and that Carole King had a pretty amazing career even before she was hangin' out in a sunbeam with a cat on the cover of Tapestry can learn something from this one.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

On one of my trips to Manhattan, I went to the entrance of the Brill Building, thinking "wow how many legendary songwriters went through these doors?" I was star struck just standing there. The songwriting teams of Leiber & Stoller, Mann & Weil, Bacharach & David, Pomus & Shuman, King & Goffin, and my personal faves Barry & Greenwich -all fantastic. If not exactly the golden era, it was for sure when youth had a voice in their culture. This is s very good book on that era - although the world of the Four Seasons is missing from this narrative. I would also recommend the recent biography of music hustler and songwriter Bert Berns - which is a tad better book on this era of pop music history.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great exploration of the ‘brill building’ era of American pop songwriting – these were the writing duos who produced a huge body of phenomenal songs in the 50s and 60s for the likes of Elvis, the Ronettes, Gene Pitney, the Drifters, Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, the Shirelles and many more. Goffin & King, Pomus & Shuman, Bacharach & David, Barry & Greenwich, Mann & Weil, Leiber & Stoller – these people should be lauded in the same way as Mozart or Picasso as far as I’m concerned in creating awe-inspiring, immortal works of ART – vital, moving, populist works of art that work on a complex number of levels. On the other hand I hate these people – I’d give my left arm to write a song a tenth as good as “Leader Of The Pack” – Ellie Greenwich had a hand in writing at least a dozen songs that are equally as good. The concentration of talent is as unbelievable as the short space of time in which most of these songs were produced – most within the same 4 year period from roughly 1960 to 1964 when the scene was more or less obliterated overnight by the arrival of the 3 B’s (the Beatles, the British Invasion and Bob Dylan). There’s a possibly apocryphal scene in the book where Gerry Goffin and Carole King go backstage at a Dylan show at Carnegie Hall to congratulate him and he treats them with the sarcastic disdain of the new kid on the block – you just want to grab his lapels and scream in his face that he should be down on his hands and knees kissing these people’s feet! “Queen Jane Approximately” is a fine composition but these are the 2 people that between them wrote “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”, “Goin’ Back”, “Chains”, “One Fine Day”, “The Locomotion”, “Oh No, Not My Baby”, “Pleasant Valley Sunday”, “No Easy Way Down”, “Halfway To Paradise”, “Wasn’t Born To Follow”, “It Might As Well Rain Until September”, “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman”, “Don’t Bring Me Down”, “Take Good Care Of My Baby”, “Up On The Roof”, “I’m Into Something Good”, “The Porpoise Song”!!!!!!!!! Jesus fucking H. Christ. There’s countless examples of casual tossed off genius in the book. At the same 3 hour afternoon recording session in 1960 that Ben E. King lays down “Spanish Harlem”, Leiber and Stoller ask him if he’s got anything else and the 3 of them knock together “Stand By Me” in half an hour. “Stand By Me”! Aaarrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I would have maybe liked some more biographical info on the characters in the book, as well as more in-depth analysis of what happened to them after the ‘golden age’ of American rocknroll, but there’s so much to cram in that certain pages become monotonous with the lists of endless recording dates and writing sessions so on the whole I think Emerson necessarily focuses on particular elements of the story only. For further reading there’s a great website Spectropop (www.spectropop.com) which features some lengthy interviews with some of the protagonists and bit-part players featured here. An essential read for anyone that loves pop music.

[Bruce · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a bit coincidental that I'm about to damn this book with faint praise the night after a Glee episode that included two now relatively obscure Burt Bacharach tunes from the peak of his songwriting collaboration with Hal David. Ironic, since the Bacharach-David and sort of, maybe, the Goffin-King teams were the reasons I picked up Emerson's book to begin with. Here's all you need to know about Always Magic in the Air -- only 60 pages in I was desperate to skim the remainder.

This book represents a lot of sound and fury about really very little. Our protagonists, who unknowingly represented the waning days of pop music songwriting independent from performance (before the Beatles changed all that), parade before the reader with scanty Brooklyn/Brighton Beach biographical blurbs, struggle to climb the exploitative ladder of the recording industry's entrenched song publishers, producers, record distributors, and emergent payola-influenced rock stations ultimately each to crank out dozens of songs and novelties of which maybe a handful are worth remembering.

A stroll through the S’s in the index reveals the following list:

* Save the Last Dance for Me
* Searchin’
* Send for the Doctor
* She Say (Oom Dooby Doom)
* Shoppin’ for Clothes
* Smokey Joe’s Cafe
* Some Kind of Wonderful

Bear in mind that this represents Emerson’s own selection of works to showcase. Nor does Emerson even mean to champion the full catalog of Leiber & Stoller, Neil Sedaka, Pomus & Shuman, etc. songs. He prefers instead to spend his energies filling out a lifestyle sketch of the competent mediocrities who came of age in the late 1950s. As this is only mildly interesting and certainly less insightful than your average liner notes, it’s never clear why Emerson believed the subject matter rated a full-length book.

As noted, I had high hopes going in. Bacharach’s and David’s earlier ouerve might have yielded a closer look, among other things for bringing significant rhythmic invention to popular music prior to the Beatles’ arrival on American soil (after all, “Anyone Who Had a Heart” jumps from 5/8 to 4/4 with a single 7/8 bar for kicks and yet somehow managed to reach No. 8 on the charts in 1964). Certainly the example of how such epiphanies could ultimately be drowned by the commercial pressures of mass-production in an undifferentiated clot of contemporary schmaltz would have been intriguing. Yet Emerson offers no such insights and rather treats his litany of selected songs as insightfully as the alphabetical index. In a typical (and typically dismissive) passage, Emerson writes (at pp. 246-247):

Incredibly, Bacharach and David did not have a No. 1 hit record until 1968, with Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love with You,” followed in 1969 by B.J. Thomas’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” and in 1970 by the Carpenters’ “(They Long to Be) Close to You.” What unites these records and distinguishes them from No. 1 singles such as “Yakety Yak,” “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Breaking Up is Hard to Do,” “Chapel of Love,” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” – as well as from the best of Bacharach and David’s earlier work – is their vapidity.”

We'll have to disagree about "Chapel of Love" (no less enduring for all of its vapidity), but given Emerson's own take on the material, you have to wonder why he thought it worth the research effort and ink.

On the other hand, when Emerson offers praise (as with Pomus & Shuman’s Dion-performed “Teenager in Love”), he can be hard to take seriously. At page 49, he bloviates, “the very first verse announces that the stakes are perilously high:

Each time we have a quarrel
It almost breaks my heart
‘Cause I am so afraid
That we will have to part.

Continuing in the same vein, Emerson’s thrill with a Bacharach song like “A House is Not a Home” (embedded in another list at page 177) would seem to lie in the triviality of its origins as the theme song of a film about a brothel madam.

But surely if such a song is worth mentioning, there’s more to be said about either it or the mindset of the songwriters who produced it. Anyone who watched Glee’s “Home” episode the other night will have heard just how effective this song can be performed out of context (which is probably how Dionne Warwick scratched the charts with it). Alas, the Bacharach-David number with which it was paired (a brilliant Kristen Chenoweth rendition of the Fifth Dimension-popularized “One Less Bell to Answer”) does not appear in Emerson’s book at all.

The whole enterprise comes across as rather unpromising. I should have taken a cue from the book’s introduction, where Emerson says of his chosen subjects (at p. xv): “Their songwriting craft… paved the way for the British Invasion that would roll right over many of them.” Ummm… great? I suggest readers skim this book if they must pick it up, the better to skip forward to that period even Emerson would agree was more influential.

[Jeremy Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

They put the bomp
Imagine tuning into a Golden Oldies station, or picking up a sixties compilation CD or playlist. The chances are pretty good that sooner or later you'll hear a song that was written by one of the seven songwriting partnerships described in this book. For example:

- We Gotta Get Out Of This Place
- Save The Last Dance For Me
- The Loco-Motion
- 24 hours from Tulsa
- Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy
- Stupid Cupid
- Jailhouse Rock

which were created by, respectively, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, Doc Pomus & Mort Shuman, Gerry Goffin & Carole King, Burt Bacharach & Hal David, Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich, Neil Sedaka & Howard Greenfield and Jerry Lieber & Mike Stoller, who were all working in Manhattan's Brill Building and the neighbouring 1650 Broadway during the late 1950's and early 1960's. Besides the many hits that these duos produced, there were other successful permutations: for example, Mann & Weil and Lieber & Stoller teamed up to write "On Broadway" (a line from which gives this book its title), Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin collaborated on the immortally goofy "Who Put The Bomp (In The Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)", and when Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich wrote with Phil Spector, they produced some of the most memorable songs of all time, including "Be My Baby", "Then He Kissed Me" and "River Deep, Mountain High". This book also describes (p111) the afternoon that, on a whim, Carole King and Gerry Goffin switched partners with Howard Greenfield and Jack Keller (Greenfield's partner prior to Neil Sedaka). Greenfield and Goffin's song got nowhere, but King and Keller had produced "Crying In The Rain", which was a big hit for the Everly Brothers in 1961.

That they found it so easy to switch partners is partly due to the things they all had in common, listed here as (p267) "their youth, their Jewish roots, their upbringing in New York City's outer boroughs [and] their love of black and Latin music". In addition, there was an atmosphere of friendly competition that was engendered - at least initially - by Don Kirshner, to whose publishing company most of them were contracted. He tried to make it feel like a family, and largely succeeded - indeed, Mann & Weil, Goffin & King and Barry & Greenwich were all married couples at the time, and Cynthia Weil memorably comments (p114) "We had no friends except for Carole and Gerry [...] We didn't have friends outside the business because nobody understood what we were doing."

This book carefully lays out the history of the Brill Building era by focussing on these seven partnerships, describing their origins and the lives of the individual writers, their methods of working and their successes and failures. To be sure, although each produced classic songs, they can't all be ranked as being of equal importance: thus, I think that the output of Sedaka & Greenfield wasn't as important as that of Goffin & King, which includes numerous examples of what could be described as the perfect pop song (my personal undying favourite being "I'm Into Something Good"). And - as other reviewers have noted - the author's eye is not uncritical: he distinguishes the merely adequate from the ground-breaking - for example, he highlights how Lieber & Stoller's production of The Drifter's "There Goes My Baby" introduced the use of strings into R&B and rock 'n' roll. He also delineates the end of their era, partly caused by the rise of Tamla Motown (who started out emulating Brill Building songwriting methods, and ended up surpassing them), and partly by replacement of the songwriter by the singer-songwriter (like Bob Dylan and the Beatles); only Carole King was really successful in re-inventing herself and transitioning to this new era.

I tracked this book down following a visit to New York City last year, during which I inadvertently walked past the Brill Building several times. Well-written, thoroughly researched, and entertainingly presented, it evokes a specific chapter in American culture, and sends the reader back to listen to the timeless songs which these remarkable writers produced. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who's curious about the stories that lie behind them.

Originally reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 February 2011

[Nathan Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

I typically tell people who ask what kind of music I listen to that my taste essentially matches up with the artists and songs performed in The T.A.M.I. Show, so needless to say I agree with John Lennon and Paul McCartney that much of the best American popular music ever recorded comes from the Brill Building era. Emerson’s wonderful, passionate, tough-minded examination of those years, that place (NYC) and those writers (Goffin-King, Barry-Greenwich, Mann-Weill, Bacharach-David, Leiber-Stoller, Pomus-Schuman) is intoxicating in its love for music that has lived so long past its assembly line construction, whose very manner of creation is an illustration of how art takes on a life of its own when it passes from the hands of its creators. After all, could even a pair of writers as brilliant as Carole King and Gerry Goffin have imagined what Shirley Alston Reeves would do with the bridge of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”. Emerson tracks the personal and professional lives of these writers and often comes away with a bleak picture of married couples and friends unable to survive their own successes or declines. In some ways the anticlimactic way that Brill Building pop music falters and fades is a perfect illustration of how much youth culture is a quick, massive lightning strike designed to be as temporary as so many of the professional and romantic relationships chronicled in the book. Emerson steeps us in it all, makes us want to hear these records again, to hold on to them so tightly, and to go on a journey that was destined to end bittersweetly almost before it began. A pop music tome I will treasure nearly as much as the music it catalogs. And man, part of me really wishes I’d lived in the right time and location to be best pals with Ellie Greenwich.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun chronicle of the rise and fall of the Brill Building, the factory that churned out hundreds of hits. You find yourself saying "Wow, they wrote *that* song?" a lot. Like you don't know who they are, but you've heard their music. Or if you do know the songwriters, you didn't know they got started earlier than when they became stars (looking at King and Sedaka, certainly). Anyway, Emerson's reporting is top-notch and the storytelling is rich. Not only do you learn who-what-where-when-and-why, but you get great insights into the songwriting and production processes, as well as the business side of things. To the latter point, you might need a shower. To the former point, you'll need to take notes.

[Mark Lieberman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have tried and failed to read this one a few times, but since I just read a book about some of the girl groups of the 1960’s, and some of the songwriters from that book were featured pretty prominently in this one. So, I gave it a go again and am very glad, I did, because I really enjoyed it.

Not only did this book tell the stories of how the songwriting teams of Mike Lieber and Jerry Stoller, Carol King and Gerry Goffin, Jeff Barry and Elle Greenwich, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, and more, but it also told the stories of the hits.

[Matthew Lederman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great intro to a final period of musical history where songwriters reigned supreme. A well researched history documenting some of the finest songwriters of the 50’s and 60’s, before acts like The Beatles and Dylan; who all wrote their own songs, ended the era.
The writing is very dry and often reads like a list of names and song titles. I had higher hopes for some more detailed storytelling and deeper biographies of the main subjects, but I suppose this is not that book. Still - a worthwhile read if you are curious about this era and the pop music that had now lasted over 70 years.

[Bruce Raterink · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. As a fan of Brill Building music, I made playlists for each of the seven pairs of songwriters in the book and listened as I read. Not only did I learn more about the background of each of the writers and the yin/yang of their competitive/collaborative involvement with each other's songs, their were numerous anecdotes about individual songs and their serendipitous origins. Highly recommended for fans of late fifties and early sixties pop rock.

[Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Far better than I expected, and far better than it had any right to be. I was expecting a warm nostalgic shower with heavy reliance on a handful of subjects; what I got was a shrewd, cool-eyed view of the era and smart takes on its songs, many with surprising details. (Who knew Ellie Greenwich sang on Aretha’s “Chain of Fools”? Not me!)

High praise for author Emerson. And I’m glad he got so many of these people on the record while they were still alive.

[Grindy Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good tale about the Pop-Industrial Complex of the 1950s and 1960s. The author gives a number of acts their due, a due they wouldn't get on their own because they flamed out so quickly or were too shallow to have a meaningful impact on pop music history. That's the book's strength, and if you want to know more about the Shangri-Las and Neil Sedaka, this book is for you.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually the second time I’ve read this book. I sold it back years ago but after seeing the Carole King musical “Beautiful” and coning back from NYC I remembered this book so bought it and reread it. While the songs and songwriters were a little before my time, I knew most of the songs and the writers since they were still somewhat popular in the 70’s.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun, read! So many details that I wished for a chart of all the hits and who they were written by and the combinations of writers. But in the end, I just let the book wash over me with impressions of how many great songs and how talented these writers were during this era.

[Michael J. Flynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun overview of the Brill building hitmakers of the 50's and '60's.

[Jerry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish his writing style was as good as the songwriters he penned this book about. Convoluted .

[Mark Singer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book that covers an often overlooked aspect of the music of the 60s.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful book that provides insight and background to an important part of American music history. Highly recommend

[Jeffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is just not well written, unengaging and seems to be in desperate need of an editor.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read.

[Michael Awotwi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brill building

Loved this book, it was great reading about all the great brill building writers and the history of that period. As a musician I highly recommend it!

[Paul Pessolano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Always Magic in the Air” by Ken Emerson, published by Penguin Books.

Category – Media/Rock and Roll Publication Date – October, 2005.

If you read the book, “The Wrecking Crew” you know it is the story of the session musicians that played the music on most of the hits of the 50’s and 60’s. “Always Magic in the Air” is the story of the songwriters of the same era. These are the guys and gals who put together the music and lyrics to all those great songs that are still enjoyed today.

The most famous duo was Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, probably best known for the songs they put together for The Coasters, although they were giants in all aspects of the business. They sold their company for 2.5 million dollars which included the rights to the songs. Although at the time it seemed like a good decision, they regret selling the rights but they never believed the music would have lasted this long. They believed it would only last for the time that it was on the Billboard Charts. The book describes an unbelievable lifestyle that found these people banging out hit after hit in just days and how the sound was produced and what group would be given the opportunity to sing the song.

This is a great companion book to “The Wrecking Crew” and a definite must for those who enjoy the music of that era and want to know just how it all came about.

[Kim Loughran · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great romp through a wild, wacky era that produced -- by accident -- songs that entered the canon of the American Songbook, up there with the Olympians: Gershwin, Berlin, Porter et al. The book became slightly claustrophobic when I realised how concentrated the hits were to a period and to a small group. But it fed my pride as the father of a Jew (not one myself) that Jews were and are so prolific and talented in culture. The author knows music and spread his hyperbolae thinly and judiciously. I'm not sure how much my enjoyment owed to my age; I was a teenager at the time he writes about.
Sometime I'll compile a list of songs that had nonsense syllables as titles: Da Do Ron Ron, Shangalang, She Say Oom Dooby Doom, etc. On second thoughts, I'm not a teenager anymore.

[Ralphz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you like '60s music, the girl groups, sing-along-able hits that didn't involve British groups?

Then you liked the writers of the Brill Building. Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Neil Sedaka ... all of the familiar (and less-familiar) names are in "Always Magic in the Air."

An amazing nexus of tunesmiths resided at the Brill Building in New York, pounding out hit after hit ("The Locomotion," "Leader of the Pack," "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do," etc.).

This book looks at the teams that made the songs, and digs into their history, lifes, loves and jealousies. Song after song will bounce around in your head as you read this book, and that's a good thing.

More reviews at my WordPress site, Ralphsbooks.

[Rubyusvi · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are my favorite songs. I knew that before I opened the book, but while reading, I was again and again astonished at all the songs that were written by these duos (Ruby Baby!) I was excited and my head was filled with music and handclaps the entire page-turning time. It made me want to make mixes and read more in-depth bios of the song-writers involved - next up, Doc Pomus and Carole King. Really everyone, should read this book and "feel the music hold you tight." I mean it, such a fucking golden age of songwriting and producing. Pick up the book, and watch the A&E Biographies of the Brill Building and Leiber & Stoller (the Bacharach one is boring though, skip it.)

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good peak behind the curtain into the songwriting industry that basically started in the days of Cole Porter and Jimmy McHugh and continues today with Diane Warren and song doctors Glen Ballard and Desmond Child. You may notice a dip in quality between those sets of names. The Brill Building songwriting teams in this book - Lieber and Stoller, Pomus and Shuman, Barry and Greenwich, Goffin and King and more - created scores of amazing tunes, but just as much forgettable schlock and crap. Their attempts to stay relevant after the helped usher in the horrible cookie-cutter model employed in the industry today. This is a very entertaining, enlightening look at how sausage is made.

[Joe Ruiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very readable and comprehensive study on an under-appreciated part of Rock history. Often called Brill Building Rock after the NYC building many of these song writers worked in, this music bridges the gap between the original Rock'n'Roll explosion of the mid 50's and the British Invasion/MoTown/Folk-Rock explosions of the mid 60's. From the Coasters and the Drifters thru the Shirelles, the Shangrilas, and even the Monkees, these writers left a trail of pop songs people love even now. One can even think of these writers as the Twilight of Tin Pan Alley. Very well researched book.

[Tina · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many names! Of people, of producers, of artists, of songs--this sometimes got a little tiring. But in general, it's quite an interesting overview of the Brill Building pop music writers scene. I wish it came with a CD! Off to find my Shangri-Las album.... But here's my favorite line, when he's describing the effect of Dylan's emergence on the Brill Building songwriters: "Dylan crammed more words into a verse than [Gerry] Goffin expended in an entire song, and they were wide-ranging, in-your-face, and adult (or at least collegiate)."

[adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-researched book about the great American pop songwriters of the 50's and 60's. It's really cool to hear the stories behind the songs, especially the Barry/Greenwich and Mann/Weill songwriting teams. The author was a bit too reverent about the music, though...it's just pop music for kids, after all.

[Kevin Pates · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story of the song-writing teams in New York at the Brill Building and 1650 Broadway is a great history of how many pop hits from the 1950s and 1960s were created. Carole King, Neil Sedaka and Burt Bacharach are among those who tell the story of the competition between the writing teams and what happened to the 14 writers.