Al Kooper Before, During, and After "Like a Rolling Stone": Humor, Taste, and Chutzpah

The ultimate rock & roll survivor tells the story of the so-called Brill Building Pop era: "Carole, Barry, and Cynthia were high echelon. I was low echelon."

Before the Beatles and Bob Dylan diminished their relevance (demolished is a more accurate word), three midtown Manhattan buildings dominated the music industry in America and beyond. These were 1619, 1650, and 1697 Broadway. Between the late Fifties and mid-Sixties, when the venerable business of music publishing (the care, feeding, and exploitation of songwriters) adapted itself to rock & roll, two of the above addresses were of far less significance than the third. 1697, between 53rd and 54th Streets, consisted largely of fly-by-night music publishers, record labels, recording studios, and rehearsal spaces. Its main distinction was as the home of the Ed Sullivan (then David Letterman, now Steven Colbert) shows. 1619 was the only one of the

Portrait of the artist as an outerborough punk, ca. 1960

buildings with a name. Once music publishing’s flagship, by 1960 the Brill Building was a shell of its former self. In an irritating misnomer, the early Sixties music that welled out of all three buildings is everywhere, and erroneously, called “the Brill Building Sound.” The Brill Building was indeed the hub of the music business—from 1935 to 1955, when songwriters wore fedoras, suits and ties. I’m going to take the corrective step of referring to early Sixties, midtown-Manhattan-based rock and & roll not as “the Brill Building Sound,” but as Neo-Tin Pan Alley, the successor to Jimmy van Heusen’s, Hoagy Carmichael’s, and Mills Publishers’ milieu (Irving Mills managed, published, and ripped off Duke Ellington for a dozen years): the original Tin Pan Alley. (It actually wasn’t; see footnote¹ ).

The Brill Building continued to harbor a few major Neo-Tin Pan Alley players, including the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and their jumping record label, Red Bird, and the songwriting duo of Burt Bacharach (music) and Hal David (words). Bacharach may well be the finest composer that the era produced. His and David’s muse was Dionne Warwick, in whose first, 1962, hit, “Don’t Make Me Over,” Bacharach’s trademarks— unconventional chords and off-kilter time signatures—are already on full display. “Bacharach destroyed me,” Kooper said. “Changed my life. I’d never heard anything like it. In ‘Don’t Make Me Over,’ he played a B-minor in the key of C. No one had ever done that before. That’s an amazing chord change.”²

Bacharach/David and Leiber/Stoller’s brilliance notwithstanding, the rise of rock & roll songwriting and of 1650 Broadway, on 51st Street, was simultaneous and symbiotic. 1650 was where the action was. “I’d have to say,” Kooper writes in his informative, and very funny, Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Survivor, “that the majority of the music business from 1960 to ‘65 was at 1650,” most of it, moreover, in a single company: Aldon Music. During those years, Aldon’s co-owner and prime mover, Don Kirshner, whom Time Magazine dubbed “the Man with the Golden Ear,” saw to it that Aldon became what Kooper called “the hottest song-publishing concern of the early sixties and perhaps of all time.”