Post by annaj26 on Sept 6, 2009 21:59:32 GMT -5
This is a great article! It's a kind of history about the Brill Building and Carole King and the other women who worked there, writing music.
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Simply Brill: the women who shaped rock'n'roll
Songwriter Ellie Greenwich, who died last week, in the studio in 1964 in New York. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Number 1619 stands gold-fronted and 11 storeys high, looking out over the clatter of Broadway. Better known as the Brill Building, it occupied prime position in the few short blocks that constituted the heart of New York's music scene in the 1960s; there were 165 music businesses in the Brill Building alone, and yet more in the buildings at 1650 and 1697, just along the street. This building, and the small stretch between 49th and 53rd streets, changed not only popular music, but also the role of women in songwriting.
Carole King, Cynthia Weil and Ellie Greenwich – who died last week at the age of 68 – were three of the Brill Building's finest songwriters, and some of the first women to embed themselves in the pop machine. Writing alone or in partnerships, they were responsible for hits such as Will You Love Me Tomorrow? and The Loco-Motion (King), You've Lost That Loving Feeling and We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Weil) and Leader of the Pack and River Deep, Mountain High (Greenwich). Their compositions in the 60s defined the era – full of all the doo-wop and sweet kisses, heartache and innocence of teenage love affairs – and gave a voice to many young female music fans.
"Today, we tend to overlook and write off the Brill Building era as that girly period between Elvis and the Beatles," says Professor Mary E Rohlfing, author of Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My Baby: A Re-evaluation of Women's Roles in the Brill Building Era. "The passing of Ellie Greenwich has begun what I hope will be a more serious look at how women shaped rock'n'roll and how that sound continues to permeate and matter to the music today."
The Brill Building's relationship with songwriting began soon after its completion in 1931, when the Depression forced its owners to rent out office space to music publishing companies. Many of the Big Band era hits were written here, and the path for King, Weil and Greenwich was arguably paved by Rose Marie McCoy. One of the most influential songwriters of the 50s and 60s, she wrote hits for Elvis Presley and Ike and Tina Turner and, as a black female songwriter from the American south, had to fight harder than anyone to get her songs heard. "She knew how to hang in there with the big boys," soul singer Maxine Brown explains. "Everyone was scrapping to get there, but it was always men. They were the producers, they were the promoters, they were the piano players. Women didn't have a place, so she made a place for herself."
In 1958, Don Kirshner, a mildly successful songwriter, formed Aldon Music with his business partner Al Nevins. Their aim was to take the professional, conveyor-belt approach to songwriting, perfected by Tin Pan Alley, and apply it to rock'n'roll. It was Aldon who signed up many of the songwriters associated with the Brill, beginning with Neil Sedaka and going on to include Weil, Greenwich and King. Many wrote in teams or duos, and for the women of the Brill Building, this meant writing with their husbands. Greenwich wrote with Jeff Barry, King (an ex-girlfriend of Sedaka, and the inspiration behind his hit Oh Carol) with Gerry Goffin, and Weil with Barry Mann. "In addition to writing, Greenwich and King, especially, became arrangers and producers, crafting not just the songs but ultimately how the records too would sound," notes Rohlfing. "Greenwich recalled that when she first started telling male musicians what to do and when, they balked, but as they recognised that she knew what she was doing, they listened and responded to her."
King, a native New Yorker, later reinvented herself as a singer, embodying the new breed of female singer-songwriters in the 70s. But she cut her teeth at the Brill, writing songs such as Pleasant Valley Sunday for the Monkees and Up On the Roof for the Drifters. "Every day we squeezed into our respective cubbyholes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky," she recalled in Simon Frith's book The Sociology of Rock. "You'd sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubbyhole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure in the Brill Building was really terrific – because Donny (Kirshner) would play one songwriter against another. He'd say: 'We need a new smash hit' – and we'd all go back and write a song and the next day we'd each audition for Bobby Vee's producer
Weil, meanwhile, was a dancer and actor before she found her songwriting ability. She and Mann were the beatniks of the Brill, and their songs often reflected the darker strains of pop culture, influenced by the underground scene of jazz and poetry spilling out of Greenwich Village in the early 60s. Their songs reflected the prevailing sense of change – the Animals' We Gotta Get Out of This Place, for instance, or Shape of Things to Come, a hit for Max Frost and the Troopers. "There are changes/Lyin' ahead in every road," it ran. "And there are new thoughts/ Ready and waiting to explode." Unlike King and Goffin and Greenwich and Barry, the couple remained married and later moved to the West Coast, continuing to write film scores and pop music.
Greenwich grew up in Long Island, and had been working for music publisher Leiber and Stoller for three years when she met Barry in 1960. He was already a successful songwriter, having just notched up a hit with Tell Laura I Love Her, but his collaborations with Greenwich had a different flavour. "Their quality has to do with Greenwich's gift for capturing the frisson of a decision almost made, a change that hasn't quite come, and which could still go either way," the music critic Ann Powers wrote in Greenwich's obituary for the LA Times. "The voices for which she wrote, young and nearly always female, had a natural waver. They belonged to the kids who would change everything."
To hear Greenwich and King talk about it, their music wasn't specifically female," says Rohlfing. "They were simply doing a job, supplying songs to a hit-making machine. That said, it has to have mattered to the women singers to have had those women in the studio." It was a thrilling time to be young and female in America – not only was the air charged with rock'n'roll and its burgeoning counterculture, there was also immense social change: the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and great strides in women's liberation.
Greenwich, Weil and King gave a voice to the young people of this era, particularly to its young women – to Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las, Dolores 'LaLa' Brooks of the Crystals, Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes – women with one foot in tradition and one foot in their increasingly liberated future; they sang of change and the thrill of a new era, but they sang also of chapels of love, and deaths on motorcycles, and of how everybody wants to be somebody's baby. "I am a very firm believer in equality, women and men: if you can do the job, by all means go ahead and do it," Greenwich said in an interview in 1990. "But I still feel it would be nice if that romance can be there, birds could sing if you fell in love, and you could hear violins."
By the end of the 60s, music had shifted again. Led by the likes of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, singers were choosing to write their own songs rather than rely on the teams of pop writers at offices such as the Brill. While King forged a new solo career and Weil carried her career to California, Greenwich never really found a new footing. Perhaps this was because her songwriting voice, more than any of her peers, belonged to those years and succeeded in distilling the uncertainty of the time, because, as Powers put it, hers was a voice that held a "natural waver".
Reflecting on the social change of the 60s and the end of the Brill Building days, Greenwich seemed to pine just a little for the long, sweet days of the Dixie Cups and Da Doo Ron Ron: "I think, with the loss of innocence, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, and all that happening, people got very cynical and very bitter. And, of course, a lot of the music reflected that," she said. "Progress is wonderful, but boy, it can ruin some nice things."
www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/04/women-music-pop-rock
____________________________________________________________________
Simply Brill: the women who shaped rock'n'roll
Songwriter Ellie Greenwich, who died last week, in the studio in 1964 in New York. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Number 1619 stands gold-fronted and 11 storeys high, looking out over the clatter of Broadway. Better known as the Brill Building, it occupied prime position in the few short blocks that constituted the heart of New York's music scene in the 1960s; there were 165 music businesses in the Brill Building alone, and yet more in the buildings at 1650 and 1697, just along the street. This building, and the small stretch between 49th and 53rd streets, changed not only popular music, but also the role of women in songwriting.
Carole King, Cynthia Weil and Ellie Greenwich – who died last week at the age of 68 – were three of the Brill Building's finest songwriters, and some of the first women to embed themselves in the pop machine. Writing alone or in partnerships, they were responsible for hits such as Will You Love Me Tomorrow? and The Loco-Motion (King), You've Lost That Loving Feeling and We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Weil) and Leader of the Pack and River Deep, Mountain High (Greenwich). Their compositions in the 60s defined the era – full of all the doo-wop and sweet kisses, heartache and innocence of teenage love affairs – and gave a voice to many young female music fans.
"Today, we tend to overlook and write off the Brill Building era as that girly period between Elvis and the Beatles," says Professor Mary E Rohlfing, author of Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My Baby: A Re-evaluation of Women's Roles in the Brill Building Era. "The passing of Ellie Greenwich has begun what I hope will be a more serious look at how women shaped rock'n'roll and how that sound continues to permeate and matter to the music today."
The Brill Building's relationship with songwriting began soon after its completion in 1931, when the Depression forced its owners to rent out office space to music publishing companies. Many of the Big Band era hits were written here, and the path for King, Weil and Greenwich was arguably paved by Rose Marie McCoy. One of the most influential songwriters of the 50s and 60s, she wrote hits for Elvis Presley and Ike and Tina Turner and, as a black female songwriter from the American south, had to fight harder than anyone to get her songs heard. "She knew how to hang in there with the big boys," soul singer Maxine Brown explains. "Everyone was scrapping to get there, but it was always men. They were the producers, they were the promoters, they were the piano players. Women didn't have a place, so she made a place for herself."
In 1958, Don Kirshner, a mildly successful songwriter, formed Aldon Music with his business partner Al Nevins. Their aim was to take the professional, conveyor-belt approach to songwriting, perfected by Tin Pan Alley, and apply it to rock'n'roll. It was Aldon who signed up many of the songwriters associated with the Brill, beginning with Neil Sedaka and going on to include Weil, Greenwich and King. Many wrote in teams or duos, and for the women of the Brill Building, this meant writing with their husbands. Greenwich wrote with Jeff Barry, King (an ex-girlfriend of Sedaka, and the inspiration behind his hit Oh Carol) with Gerry Goffin, and Weil with Barry Mann. "In addition to writing, Greenwich and King, especially, became arrangers and producers, crafting not just the songs but ultimately how the records too would sound," notes Rohlfing. "Greenwich recalled that when she first started telling male musicians what to do and when, they balked, but as they recognised that she knew what she was doing, they listened and responded to her."
King, a native New Yorker, later reinvented herself as a singer, embodying the new breed of female singer-songwriters in the 70s. But she cut her teeth at the Brill, writing songs such as Pleasant Valley Sunday for the Monkees and Up On the Roof for the Drifters. "Every day we squeezed into our respective cubbyholes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky," she recalled in Simon Frith's book The Sociology of Rock. "You'd sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubbyhole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure in the Brill Building was really terrific – because Donny (Kirshner) would play one songwriter against another. He'd say: 'We need a new smash hit' – and we'd all go back and write a song and the next day we'd each audition for Bobby Vee's producer
Weil, meanwhile, was a dancer and actor before she found her songwriting ability. She and Mann were the beatniks of the Brill, and their songs often reflected the darker strains of pop culture, influenced by the underground scene of jazz and poetry spilling out of Greenwich Village in the early 60s. Their songs reflected the prevailing sense of change – the Animals' We Gotta Get Out of This Place, for instance, or Shape of Things to Come, a hit for Max Frost and the Troopers. "There are changes/Lyin' ahead in every road," it ran. "And there are new thoughts/ Ready and waiting to explode." Unlike King and Goffin and Greenwich and Barry, the couple remained married and later moved to the West Coast, continuing to write film scores and pop music.
Greenwich grew up in Long Island, and had been working for music publisher Leiber and Stoller for three years when she met Barry in 1960. He was already a successful songwriter, having just notched up a hit with Tell Laura I Love Her, but his collaborations with Greenwich had a different flavour. "Their quality has to do with Greenwich's gift for capturing the frisson of a decision almost made, a change that hasn't quite come, and which could still go either way," the music critic Ann Powers wrote in Greenwich's obituary for the LA Times. "The voices for which she wrote, young and nearly always female, had a natural waver. They belonged to the kids who would change everything."
To hear Greenwich and King talk about it, their music wasn't specifically female," says Rohlfing. "They were simply doing a job, supplying songs to a hit-making machine. That said, it has to have mattered to the women singers to have had those women in the studio." It was a thrilling time to be young and female in America – not only was the air charged with rock'n'roll and its burgeoning counterculture, there was also immense social change: the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and great strides in women's liberation.
Greenwich, Weil and King gave a voice to the young people of this era, particularly to its young women – to Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las, Dolores 'LaLa' Brooks of the Crystals, Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes – women with one foot in tradition and one foot in their increasingly liberated future; they sang of change and the thrill of a new era, but they sang also of chapels of love, and deaths on motorcycles, and of how everybody wants to be somebody's baby. "I am a very firm believer in equality, women and men: if you can do the job, by all means go ahead and do it," Greenwich said in an interview in 1990. "But I still feel it would be nice if that romance can be there, birds could sing if you fell in love, and you could hear violins."
By the end of the 60s, music had shifted again. Led by the likes of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, singers were choosing to write their own songs rather than rely on the teams of pop writers at offices such as the Brill. While King forged a new solo career and Weil carried her career to California, Greenwich never really found a new footing. Perhaps this was because her songwriting voice, more than any of her peers, belonged to those years and succeeded in distilling the uncertainty of the time, because, as Powers put it, hers was a voice that held a "natural waver".
Reflecting on the social change of the 60s and the end of the Brill Building days, Greenwich seemed to pine just a little for the long, sweet days of the Dixie Cups and Da Doo Ron Ron: "I think, with the loss of innocence, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, and all that happening, people got very cynical and very bitter. And, of course, a lot of the music reflected that," she said. "Progress is wonderful, but boy, it can ruin some nice things."
www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/04/women-music-pop-rock
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