Emerson — Always Magic in the Air

Author: Ken Emerson
Title: Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era
Year: 2005
Type: Popular history (Viking, 334 pp.)

Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era is a book by Ken Emerson, a former editor at The New York Times Magazine and New York Newsday, published by Viking in 2005. It is a social history of seven songwriting teams of the Brill Building era, four pairs of men and three married couples, most of them Jewish and from New York, and it argues that they wrote a distinctly New York pop from the jazz, R&B, doo-wop, mambo and blues of the city around them. Its evidence is the careers of the teams from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, their partnerships, rivalries and business, drawn in part from the writers’ own accounts. Publishers Weekly and Robert Christgau in the Village Voice reviewed it favorably, and Geoffrey O’Brien in The New York Review of Books and Publishers Weekly found that it says little about the Black performers who recorded most of the songs, or about Motown, the British Invasion and payola.

Emerson, the former articles editor of The New York Times Magazine and op-ed editor of New York Newsday, published the book with Viking in 2005.¹ Publishers Weekly described its subject as seven songwriting teams “whose pioneering work from the late 1950s through the mid ’60s ushered rock and roll into mainstream America.”¹ Its seven teams are Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David.² Christgau described them as four male pairs and three married couples whose principals were Jewish and mostly from New York.³ Publishers Weekly called the book a “dense mix of biography, music analysis and social history” that “offers an upbeat reading of rock history,” praised Emerson’s “delight in the songwriter’s craft,” and described its coverage of the teams’ rivalries, romances and collaborations as the music business turned from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley and the youth market.¹ The book quotes Stoller, Barry and Sedaka, among others.⁴

Leonard Nevarez wrote that Emerson makes a strong case for a “quintessentially New York sound,” built from the musical fusions that the city’s multiethnic population made possible: the jazz, R&B, doo-wop, mambo and blues that the songwriters heard growing up.⁵ The book’s chapters include “In the Garden of Aldon,” on Don Kirshner and Al Nevins’s publishing company Aldon Music, and “It Was Just Jewish Latin.”⁶

Christgau called the book’s treatment of individuals and partnerships concise, engaging and insightful, and wrote that Emerson is blunt about the pretensions of late Leiber and Stoller and “the vapidity of most Bacharach.” He also wrote that most of the teams’ enduring work was recorded by Black singers, who “usually got totally screwed rather than merely exploited.”³ O’Brien, in The New York Review of Books, found “only scattered hints of how things looked to the black performers responsible for so many of their hits,” and quoted Stoller’s account that the Drifters “got no royalties.”⁴ Publishers Weekly found that the book needed a fuller discussion of Motown, the British Invasion and payola.¹

Key contributions

• A group history of seven Brill Building songwriting teams, from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s.
• The case for a New York pop built from the city’s jazz, R&B, doo-wop, mambo and blues.
• An account of the teams’ partnerships, rivalries and business, including Aldon Music.

See also

• Pop as craft — the debate over pop as a craft
• The songwriter-performer divide — the division between writing songs and performing them
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats
• The pop factory — the debate over industrial production in pop