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Brill Building

Brill Building

1619 Broadway, New York, NY 10019


The music industry was concentrated around the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, which was packed with songwriters who pitched their musical products to hit-seeking record labels.

Stories

A Young Debbie Harry Dances to Brill Building Pop

People

Debbie Harry grew up in the small idyllic town of Hawthorne, New Jersey, where her parents ran a gift shop and life was dull. “I hated suburbia,” Harry said, “and I always dreamt of having a bohemian life in New York.” At first she found her escape through music, listening to pop songs from an early age, though she didn’t collect records herself. “A friend of mine had a great record collection, and I listened to whatever was on radio,” she said. “I was always changing channels and searching around.” Harry and her friends watched American Bandstand to learn dances like the Hully Gully, the Swim, the Twist, and the Watusi to show off at their school dances. “We also did a lot of slow dancing,” she said, “a lot of grinding, which was always fun, very passionate dancing.” Much of what then dominated American radio was a product of a music busi­ness hub known as the Brill Building. It was an office building in midtown Man­hattan located at 1619 Broadway, on Forty-Ninth Street and Broadway, that held the offices of several song publishers. The “Brill Building” more generally referred to a cluster of record companies and song publishing businesses found in buildings around the same area—such as 1697 Broadway and, a little to the south, 1650 Broadway. In between was the small Roulette Records building with a neon sign that said home of the hits.

From Chapter 4 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Future Punks Embrace Doo Wop

People

Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s longtime musical collaborator, was also bitten by the rock ’n’ roll bug at an early age. Born in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, he moved around with his parents to the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn before settling in North Brunswick, New Jersey, as a teen. “Growing up in New York,” Kaye said, “most of the music that came to me was seeing the older kids sing doo-wop on the corner, but of course you’re also very close to the cultural centers of Greenwich Village. Even though I was too young to go there, you felt part of the cultural crosstalk in the city.” Most doo-wop groups around New York during the Brill Building era were basically street bands—young men who sang on corners and in school talent shows and recreation centers. “I hoped that I would be a high tenor in a doo-wop group, and that’s what singing on the corner is about,” Kaye said. “But it was mostly for fun and we weren’t very serious about it.” This was also true of future Ramones frontman Joey Ramone (born Jeffrey Hyman) and his little brother Mickey Leigh (Mitchel Lee Hyman), who as kids heard the sounds of doo-wop street singers creeping into their bedroom. Their window faced another building across the alley, which created an echo, so kids would congregate there to sing songs like “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by the Tokens. Pointing out the affinities between doo-wop and 1970s punk groups, Leigh said, “Those teenagers who were singing doo-wop in the street, you could say that was the first manifestation of DIY groups. They didn’t really need anything. They just needed a bunch of guys, and they figured out who was going to sing which parts.” Kaye also believes that the appeal of early doo-wop had to do with its accessibility. “If you weren’t trained to be a classical musician, you could sing on the corner emulating the records that you heard on the radio,” he said. “It was a sense that I think punk would also access—that you didn’t have go through a conservatory to make the music.”

From Chapter 4 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Richard Gottehrer Pumps Out Pop Hits

People

During the height of the Brill Building era, Richard Gottehrer formed a successful songwriting partnership with Bob Feldman and Jerry Goldstein, named FGG. “We became signed writers at April Blackwood Music, and they gave us a small office room in 1650 Broadway,” he said. “We would sit around in a work environment with a piano in a small room and the publisher would come in and say, ‘So-and-so is looking for a song for his next record.’ And that’s how you learned—you would try to write something that would suit them. We were constantly writing.” “For a lot of those songs, they made the song demo and cut the record in the same day,” said producer Craig Leon, who worked alongside Gottehrer in the 1970s. “It was very much that quote-unquote ‘punk’ approach.” This rapid-fire production style was used to create FGG’s biggest hit, “My Boyfriend’s Back,” recorded by the Angels. “One day Bob Feldman came in, and he had been at his local candy store getting soda and cream,” Gottehrer recalled. “Some girl came in and started screaming at a guy and literally said, ‘My boyfriend’s back and you’re gonna be in trouble because he’s gonna get you!’ ” They quickly wrote the song, and it was recorded and released within days.

From Chapter 4 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


The Shangri-Las’ Influence on Punk

People

The Shangri-Las were one of the common musical denominators that Blondie shared, and Clem Burke explained the Shangri-La’s proto-punk appeal: “They had their black leather vests and their tight black leather pants, and they sang ‘Give Him a Great Big Kiss.’ They sang about dirty fingernails, wavy hair, and leather jackets, and things like that.” The Shangri-Las cast a long shadow over glam and punk rock. The New York Dolls’ “Looking for a Kiss” borrowed the spoken word intro from their “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” and another Dolls song, “Trash,” copped the campy “How do you call your lover boy?” line from “Love Is Strange,” a catchy 1956 hit by Mickey & Sylvia. The group’s final album, Too Much Too Soon, was produced by Shadow Morton, who had crafted the girl group classics “Leader of the Pack” and “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” for the Shangri-Las. As Burke recalled, “Bubblegum rock was part of the roots of the New York music scene. Some of the old-school guys like Richard Gottehrer or Marty Thau—who had some money and success in pop music—they understood the music because they were coming from that Brill Building mentality.” Thau was the New York Dolls’ first manager before McLaren took the job, and he had previously made a living as a record promoter for late 1960s bubblegum groups the 1910 Fruitgum Company (“Simon Says”) and the Ohio Express (“Yummy Yummy Yummy”). Thau recorded the Ramones’ first demos and released Suicide’s debut album on his independent label Red Star, and also formed the production company Instant Records with the old-school industry hit maker Richard Gottehrer. “Richie was part of that whole Brill Building rock thing,” Leon said, “which had a lot of nostalgia for us because we grew up with it on the radio when we were kids.”

From Chapter 33 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore