Tin Pan Alley & Brill Building

(or, well, as it was at least a few years ago...dunno if it's the ILX influence that makes me notice it more than I previously did but it seems to me many critics don't malign these contemporary equivalents that much anymore.)

I do think pop songwriting is pretty weak at present, and I think it's because you don't really need a great song to make a great record, and I also think that there's a lot of recent-cultural-history stuff that explains why the pop hook no longer needs much of a lyrical hook to go with it, but I'm reluctant to ever enter into any "it was better in the past" arguments because I am always v. suspicious of same.

Tin Pan Alley would easily win a TS here.

There's also an episode that reclaims "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?" as one of the main masterpieces of the early 50's pre-rock Gimmick-Pop wave (masterminded by Mitch Miller), which was very very interesting to me. In fact, opposition to those records from traditional Tin Pan Alley types reflects John's criticism of the current vogue - great *records*, but not great *songs*.

(I've no idea whether this criticism was justified or not tho, most of the songs I saw clips from on the episode certainly seemed like great records at any rate, songs I am not so sure.)

So anyway John, what do you think of Mitch Miller?

http://southsidecallbox.com/images/backstabbing.jpg

as promised

Tin Pan Alley was better because Tin Pan Alley composers didn't give a damn about blues or country, and instead they were looking to European classical music from the 18th and 19th century for harmonic and melodic inspiration. Since European music has always been superior to American music, this led to better songs.

BTW, a surprisingly detailed George Goldner bio at AMG.

They were too American, simply, and too rooted in the harmonic simplicity of country music.

Tin Pan Alley was better because Tin Pan Alley composers didn't give a damn about blues or country, and instead they were looking to European classical music from the 18th and 19th century for harmonic and melodic inspiration. Since European music has always been superior to American music, this led to better songs.

These aren't just untruths: they're damned lies!

what bugs me about geir or more accurately about geir's prescence here is that his "views" are akin to holocaust deniers or crazy september 11 conspiracy theorists--i'm not saying they are on the same order of moral vacuity but they are intellectually similar, similarly perverted. and that anyone should give him any credence whatsoever infuriates me much as it does with those other psuedoviews. when people bring up stuff like those other things in my prescence i tend to change the subject or make a quick exit, but unfortunately geir is unusually persistent (and in a strange context too) and his posts just sort of sit there for all time.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0670034568/qid=1132000761/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-3865824-3582211?v=glance&s=books

http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/17261

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18562

My favorite passage:

The Brill Building sound clearly had not so much to do with ethnic confrontation or ethnic self-definition as with a fusion of influences. In part this had to do with the same kind of smoothing out of differences that turned Joel Adelberg into Jeff Barry and Robert Ridarelli into Bobby Rydell. Yet the obverse of that homogenization was the radical alchemy it took to make a dissonant mix of styles and devices—blues, gospel, doo-wop, cha-cha, mariachi, lush string arrangements, echoes of Puccini or Irving Berlin, of country and western or Broadway musical—come out sounding as if all the elements naturally belonged together.

Something quite new was being manufactured out of the collision of apparently antithetical modes, and some ears had to adjust to the noise of it. It is hard now to imagine that when Atlantic executives first heard the overpowering string section and Brazilian-inflected kettledrum part that Leiber and Stoller had added to the Drifters' "There Goes My Baby" (1959), they were so perturbed that they delayed releasing it. Even the astute Jerry Wexler thought the record—which of course proved an enormous hit—"sounded like two radio stations."

The upshot was that local music came out sounding as if it came from everywhere and nowhere. The Mystics may have been a street-corner doo-wop group of Italian-Americans from Bensonhurst, but with that name and with the rough-hewn yet ethereal harmonies on their one hit "Hushabye" (written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman)—the kind of song that makes yearning and fulfillment seem more or less the same thing—they might have dropped down from another planet. Or perhaps that other planet was simply the America where all the movies and songs were set, the America of beaches and beauty contests and advertising layouts that bore only a tenuous relation either to the world where the songs were made or to the various worlds for which they provided an increasingly inescapable soundtrack.

I wish that Al Kooper stuff JBR scanned was still there.

Geir upthread is actually technically correct about Goffin/King's more limited range of chords to someone like, say, Bacharach, but it seems a bit mechanistic to dump on them for that reason. I could understand it as a criticism of the Jesus and Mary Chain or someone similarly monotonous, but the grandiosity and sublimity of, say, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" or "Wasn't Born to Follow" totally belies the simplicity of the chord changes.

any chance of a re-up on the kooper stuff from here: http://southsidecallbox.com/images/kooper/kooper.html

even archive.com doesn't have it :(

just ordered the songmakers dvd collection after reading this thread, anyone here seen it? the lack of stuff online about the whole brill building era is pretty shocking (well, the lack of mp3s of it)

Ha, he just appeared on Mike Shelley's show and I heard what he had to say on the podcast. Also, he just came out with a new edition of that book which may be worth looking at.

Just noticed there is new Doc Pomus doc

Sounds good

Wish I were watching it right now.

A.K.A. Doc Pomus, it's called. Won the Grand Prix at the Stony Brook Film Festival apparently.

Uh, oh. "Diaries read by Lou Reed."

Don't know if I'm ready for Loupo.

Rave review from Greil Marcus on official website. Which is good, I guess.

The Doc Pomus book was very good. Lou Reed really helped him out in his later years. (Doc and Shuman were big heroes of the young Lou Reed.)

That book is awesome. The author is apparently interviewed in the movie, as is Ken Emerson, author of the Brill Building book, and Peter Guralnick. I guess this is a good use of Lou's talents.

Film was sold out at Lincoln Center last week. http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/a.k.a.-doc-pomus. Dig the photo in the slide show of Dylan and Doc, with a poster for the Albert Goldman Elvis book in the background!

Thinking of you, Doc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5XJX8sjYDE

http://wfmu.org/LCD/23/docpomus.html

Doc came within inches of meeting Presley at a 1974 Hilton Hotel press conference. But the hard-assed Colonel Parker, whom Doc knew well in the old days, wouldn't let Pomus through. Doc introduced himself to Vernon, who said his son would love to meet him, but Elvis had just left the hotel. Doc was heartbroken. Three years later, Doc and Elvis made solid arrangements to meet. But Presley died a week before the meeting, leaving Doc totally spooked.

Just finished reading the whole thing. Well worth your time.

i got to meet doc near the end of his life, when a friend of mine was working as his personal assistant. i did not appreciate this circumstance nearly as much as i should have.

wow

I sat next to him once at a Lonnie Mack show at the Bottom Line. Talked to him a little bit. The only thing I remember him saying was something about getting annoyed at record collectors giving him grief about not remembering everybody who was on a particular recording session he was supposed to be on. "How the heck should I know? Do you know how many recording dates I did back then?" That and him all of a sudden being wheeled backwards out the door after the show, as described in that Josh Alan Friedman article, although those incidents seem to be during the show.

Movie doc coming to the Washington D.C. JCC

AKA DOC POMUS
Tuesday, November 5, 7:30 pm
Doc Pomus' dramatic life is one of American music's great untold stories. Paralyzed with polio as a child, the Jewish, Brooklyn-born Jerome Felder (A.K.A Doc Pomus) reinvented himself first as blues shouter, then as one of the most prolific songwriters of the early rock and roll era.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/magazine/22lives-t.html

This story about Mort Shuman's daughter is insane.

https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/bruce-hay-paternity-trap-maria-pia-shuman-mischa-haider-follow-up.html

Just noticed that the Doc Pomus doc is on Vudu so maybe I will finally watch. Just started. Had kind of a hair rising on the back of my neck sensation when I realized that the voice reading Doc’s diary was Lou Reed. At least it sounds like it’s gotta be him, maybe I also read that it was way back when.