Magic Moments

I've been writing a lot, probably too much, about the things that divide us. Sometimes it's worth remembering things that we share. Music, for example.

I've read two very good books about American popular music this year: the first was a book that Night Writer tipped me to, Lone Star Swing, a funny and affectionate travelogue written by a Scotsman, Duncan McLean, who is a huge fan of the devoted style of music that is best known as Western Swing. The most notable figure in Western Swing was Bob Wills, who performed for many years with a group of musicians known as the Texas Playboys. While much of Wills's music, especially to the modern ear, sounds like country and western, it was actually a lot more than that, as Wills had tastes as vast and the Texas plains he traveled throughout his career. If you doubt that, try this one:

Bob Wills Boogie

You can hear the jump blues of Louis Jordan quite clearly. This version of the song was recorded back in 1946, in a time when the music industry was as segregated as the rest of society and a band with the cowboy credentials of the Texas Playboys would have seemed an unlikely source for such a rollicking beat. But Wills wasn't one to sit in a musical silo and because he was adventurous enough to integrate influences beyond what might have been expected, he helped to get sounds into the ears of his audience that they might not have accepted otherwise.

I just finished reading a book about a very different group of musical figures, the habitues of the Brill Building in New York. The book, titled Always Magic in the Air by Ken Emerson, is more of a history of the era and is written in much more scholarly fashion than McLean's somewhat picaresque adventure, but it's equally instructive. Emerson details the lives of a group of individuals who held sway over much of American popular culture for a brief period in between the peak of Elvis and the arrival of the Beatles. Some of these songwriters, particularly Burt Bacharach, remain in the public eye all these years later, but many of them are now mostly forgotten, even though they made some very important records and their songs are now part of the Great American Songbook. Think about how well these songs have held up over the years:

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote songs of astonishing variety, with everything from the raucous rock of Elvis singing Hound Dog, the elegance of the Drifters with There Goes My Baby and the Kurt Weill-decadent reading of Is That All There Is that was the last great hit of Peggy Lee, a performer who was over a generation older than either Lieber or Stoller.

Burt Bacharach and Hal David went from working with Marty Robbins (The Story of My Life) to the precise, tricky readings of Dionne Warwick (I Say a Little Prayer), the cartoonish Tom Jones (What's New, Pussycat?) and the dulcet MOR of The Carpenters (Close to You).

Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil wrote three songs that would probably fit into the top 100 songs of the rock era, for three very different acts: the Drifters' version of On Broadway (the George Benson version is pretty good, too), the Animals' classic We Gotta Get Out of This Place and the greatest moment of the careers of Mann-Weil, Phil Spector and the Righteous Brothers, You've Lost That Loving Feeling.

Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman gave us classics from Dion and the Belmonts (A Teenager in Love), the Drifters (This Magic Moment and Save the Last Dance for Me) and fun kitsch for Elvis (Viva Las Vegas).

Carole King and Gerry Goffin, skewing younger, asked the eternal question (the Shirelles' Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow), threw us a dance craze big enough for Little Eva and Grand Funk Railroad (The Locomotion) and even helped get the Monkees off the ground (Pleasant Valley Sunday). King later went on to become an exemplar of the singer-songwriter movement with her album Tapestry in 1971.

Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich became the go-to songwriters for Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound, feeding the beast on behalf of the Crystals (The He Kissed Me), the Ronettes (Be My Baby) and even Ike and Tina Turner (River Deep, Mountain High), while also feeding the British Invasion (Manfred Mann's Do Wah Diddy) and some tough chicks from the Bronx (the Shangri-Las Leader of the Pack).

The book also spends time detailing the career of Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, who were successful but more of a self-contained unit than the other teams.

There were two things that I think matter about these songwriting teams:

• They were professionals, in the best sense of the term. They all saw their business as making people happy through entertainment. While it would be churlish to denigrate the brilliance of a songwriter like Bob Dylan, even in his moments of absolute brilliance there was always a hint of self-indulgence in Dylan's music and when lesser performers emulated Dylan, the results got worse over time. The Brill Building songwriters didn't have time for that. They didn't want to make a statement -- they wanted to make people happy. There's a lot of value in that.


• They were multicultural, in the best sense of the term. What you had were a bunch of Jewish kids, mostly from New York, writing songs that absorbed the influences of what they heard and saw. It is not coincidental that some of the most transcendant sides recorded here were for the Drifters, an African-American group with a constantly changing roster of singers, who managed to maintain an astonishing level of quality despite the repeated roster shifts. You also heard in many of these songs a recurring rhythmic motif, the Afro-Cuban beat known as the baion. Even though the nation was still suffering from the ravages of segregation during the early part of the 1960s, the music coming from New York was an amalgam of various life experiences, written to speak to people universally. The notion that this music would be something any racial or ethnic group couldn't understand is completely alien to what these people produced.

Even as we approach a half century of desegregation and civil rights for all, we find our culture balkanized in many ways. I think we could use the forward thinking of people like Bob Wills and the songwriters of the Brill Building. Music can reach anyone, if we are open enough to listen.