Book Reviews : Brill , Jimi, Punk

Rock steady

In ripening forms, rock 'n' roll pulsed throughout the 20th century's later
decades
By James Parker | November 27, 2005

Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era
By Ken Emerson
Viking, 334 pp., illustrated, $25.95

Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix
By Charles R. Cross
Hyperion, 400 pp., $24.95

Made in the UK: The Music of Attitude 1977-1983
By Janette Beckman
Powerhouse, 132 pp., $35

EXCERPT

The Brill Building is a place -- 1619 Broadway, to be precise -- but it is
also an idea: the idea of a hit factory, a capitalist hothouse from which
chart-busting platters come whizzing out like Frisbees. Ken Emerson's superb
''Always Magic in the Air" chronicles the rise and fall of a set of songwriting
teams associated with the Brill Building sound, which ruled radio for almost a
decade from the mid-'50s forward. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Doc Pomus
and Mort Shuman, Carole King and Gerry Goffin -- these partnerships and others
like them were responsible for half the great tunes that still smolder and
pop deep in the damaged memory banks of rock 'n' roll: ''Jailhouse Rock,"
''Walk On By," ''You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'." Mostly Jewish, mostly from
Brooklyn, the hit makers were a pleasingly nonromantic crew. Business was their
business; stale rooms and watched clocks were the handmaidens to their art.
Pomus wrote smash after smash for Elvis without ever meeting him or seeing him
perform live. So did Leiber and Stoller, until they got too creative and were
told to interfere no further in ''the process known as Elvis Presley."

Skeptical, witty, in love with the music, Emerson is the ideal companion for
this narrative. He describes the slow blues ''Still in Love," which Pomus
wrote for Big Joe Turner, as being ''as blunt, balanced, alliterative, and
concise as a dispatch from Julius Caesar." And here he is on the ''sonic
adventure of the Drifters," ''There Goes My Baby," written and produced by Leiber and
Stoller: ''Suspended between the churning violins and cello and the
timpani's hollow thud, the lead vocal seems to echo out of some desolate limbo." This
is the kind of writing that enhances appreciation; back to the music you go,
to thrill again at that hostile chasm of violins, those frowning timpanis,
and poor Ben E. King clinging to his tune with barely a bass line for company.

The original Brill Building phenomenon, as Emerson records, was more or less
swept away by the '60s. Goffin was literally driven insane by the
unforgiving brilliance of Bob Dylan, and took to delivering ''schizophrenic tirades" --
in the manner of Dylan's ''Subterranean Homesick Blues" -- while reportedly
cultivating a large drug habit. (He survived, improbably, to write ''Saving
All My Love for You" for Whitney Houston in the '80s.) The Monkees, originally
conceived in the boardroom as a Beatles/Byrds jingle-jangle package for
teenyboppers, cozily psychedelic, with their songs all written for them, went
haywire and autonomous. The thuggishness of these nice little Monkees, these
proto-Muppets, is quite a revelation: Micky Dolenz tipping a Coke over his
producer, Mike Nesmith putting his fist through a wall and saying ''That could
have been your face" to a record company lawyer . . . Beautiful stuff.

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