THE LONESOME TALE OF PAUL GRIFFIN

All but invisible in his prime and all but forgotten today, a true hero of American pop music. The music business eats its own.

Some 60-plus years ago, in a brief, spectacular run, the rock & roll songwriters and music publishers of the Brill Building and 1650 Broadway dominated America’s music industry. The two buildings, and others nearby, constituted a song factory, a rabbit-warren of young, ambitious writers hammering out what they fervently hoped would be a Top 40 hit. Here, the raffish flair of a fading Tin Pan Alley met the urgency of what had not yet been dubbed “youth culture.” Brill Building Pop, as the music that poured from these buildings is loosely known, was a writer-based sound. A few of the musicians who brought the writers’ work to life have become famous. Most have not. Here is the story of one who didn’t. This piece originally appeared in the September 3rd, 1993 issue of Goldmine Magazine in somewhat different form. A good deal of research on Brill Building Pop—for instance, Joel Selvin’s biography of the fascinating music-business maverick Bert Berns—has been done since I wrote this story. With a few exceptions, I have let the facts stand as I gathered them 30 years ago.

THE RECORDING STUDIOS OF Broadway, Manhattan, scattered 10 blocks east and west, were where the songwriter’s word was made flesh. If the two publishers’ buildings were beehives of talent, so were the 10 or so major studios, open from mid-morning sometimes all night, booking three, four and five three-hour sessions a day, 10 unending streams of music created, as speedily as possible, by producers, engineers, and some of the most talented musicians in America.

The favorite studio may have been Mira Sound, a decrepit hole in the wall on the second floor of the America, a hooker hotel and Lenny Bruce’s occasional home. Unaccountably, Mira was the best-sounding room in the city, its wretched bathroom doubling as a first-rate echo chamber. Dick Charles Recording, where Don Kirshner’s writers and artists often worked, was at 7233 Seventh Avenue, right next to the Metropole Cafe; A&R Recording was at 799 Seventh; Ohlmstead was at 40th between Fifth and Sixth, Bell Sound was at Broadway and 53rd, and Fine Sound was on 57th, next to a 24-hour beauty parlor where the hookers got their hair done at midnight.

By the 1950s, the studio player had replaced the traveling big-band sideman as pop music’s prototypical wage-earner. Many session musicians were former big-band members, orphaned a decade earlier by the rise of bebop. The studios constituted their own world, a subculture with its own gods, aristocrats, plebeians, eccentrics, rivalries, jokes, racial tensions, and intergenerational skirmishes.

Make no mistake, the recording-session musician’s life has substantial blessings, but it is by its very nature exploitative. The notes the studio musician plays lodge deeply in the public’s mind and nobody knows his name; he helps generate huge royalties, this uncredited co-creator, for which he receives a few hours’ pay.

Six months ago, I happened to hear Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie” on my car radio. What leapt from the dashboard, after all these years, were not the Dylan Lite lyrics, but the piano: grave in the slow sections, a lickety-split barrage of 16th notes during the several climaxes. Faithful to the cliché, I pulled over, was pulled over, to the side of the road to listen, amazed that I hadn’t been struck earlier by this terrific playing. Sometimes it takes years for the sludge to fall away and the brilliance to shine forth. With a phone call, I learned the name of the piano player: Paul Griffin. Only vaguely familiar. I wondered what had become of him.

A month later, I happened to be sent a well-annotated multi-CD reissue of Scepter Records’ collected hits. The pianist on the bulk of the songs—the Shirelles’ “Mama Said,” the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” and Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Walk on By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” and especially “Message to Michael,” with its heartbreaking but somehow consoling solo piano intro—was Paul Griffin. I made another phone call, to a veteran recording engineer.

“Paul Griffin? Mahh-velous player, the best. Where is he? Beats the shit out of me.”

So I went looking for the best piano player of the Brill Building era and found him holding down a weekend gig in a Columbus Avenue restaurant. A handsome middle-aged man, he slid into a booth after he was finished working and began to talk.