Simply Brill:
the women who shaped rock'n'roll
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/04/women-music-pop-rock
Ellie Greenwich, who died last week, was one of a raft of 60s female
songwriters working in New York's Brill Building. Together they transformed pop
Laura Barton
4 September 2009
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."
.
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