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.

“My father was a very proud person who was one of the first Black postal clerks in New York City,” Griffin told me. “That was special, that was big-time. He and my mother sang at Paradise Baptist Church in Harlem. I sang for years in a gospel quartet with my brothers and sisters. The violin was my first real instrument and it wasn’t until I was already playing keyboards professionally that I started thinking I was not going to be a violinist.

“Most of the kids I knew, by the time they were 13 or 14, the girls were pregnant and the boys were winos or junkies or had been in some kind of trouble. They all thought the Griffin kids were terribly stuck up.” Just after high school, Griffin got an usher’s job at the Apollo Theatre. Frank Owens, the pianist for the Apollo’s famous Amateur Night, was often busy with studio work, and Griffin worked the occasional gig as Owens’s substitute. He was thinking about quitting music, taking a garment-district job, and getting serious about college when the great R&B saxophonist King Curtis heard him subbing for Owens and offered Paul a job.

In the recording studios of mid-’60s Manhattan, Curtis Ousley, from Fort Worth, Texas was a larger-than-life figure, the lead tenor saxophonist, and often bandleader, on almost every elite R&B, and many rock, sessions in New York. Physically imposing, a high-stakes cardsharp, pool shooter and dice roller, Curtis effortlessly commanded respect. He was Curtis, period; he probably signed his checks that way.“King Curtis was the damnedest man I ever saw in my life,” Griffin said. “I walked into his brownstone off Central Park West and saw what must have been tens of thousands of dollars lying out on his dresser. Curtis’s gambling money. I watched Curtis face down four gangsters he’d caught cheating him at dice. My feeling was that sooner or later something was going to catch up to him.” When it did, in August 1971, it was horribly arbitrary. Carrying an air conditioner into his Upper West Side brownstone, Curtis found two derelicts on the front stoop. Words were exchanged, one of the men pulled a knife, and stabbed Curtis. He died in the ambulance, thirty-seven years old.

Playing in Curtis’s band, “I made what I thought was absolutely all the money in the world—less than a hundred dollars a week,” recalled Griffin. The band was working Small’s Paradise in Harlem when Curtis introduced Paul to Bert Berns, a songwriter (The Isleys’ “Twist and Shout”, the Rocky Fellers’ “Killer Joe,” and the Exciters’ “Tell Him”), producer, and entrepreneur who co-started a company called Bang! Records, turned Neil Diamond from a writer into a singing star and, just before he died at 38 of a heart attack, discovered Van Morrison and released Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl.” “Bert Berns was able easily to move through a lot of different worlds,” says Griffin. “He didn’t give a damn about conservative values.”

When Curtis introduced the two, says Griffin, Berns told him, “‘Take out your datebook.’

“‘What datebook?’

“‘I got some sessions,’ he told me, ‘that I’m gonna give you right now.’”

Almost immediately, Griffin was playing three sessions a day, earning union scale of $44 per session (in the early ‘60s). Soon, he was getting an upper-crust player’s double-scale. An excellent jazz pianist, he chose to stay in rock & roll. “I got a charge, for a long time, out of being considered something special. I could read, compose, and arrange, plus I had 20 years of gospel behind me. I was more or less what they ordered.

“I didn’t get bored; matter of fact, I had a lot of fun. I was happy to be there. People don’t realize that a lot of this stuff was a bitch to play. Burt Bacharach wrote some challenging shit. And if a song was simple, it was your job to make it feel incredible, make it leap out of the radio, off the turntable, if you had to play 27 takes.”

“Since I knew music, I definitely was able to see that many of the musicians who laughed at rhythm & blues and rock & roll couldn’t play it if they tried. Could not get funky. They couldn’t understand how it was they would go onstage and get a polite response and here came someone who couldn’t read music but contacted the audience in a way that made the place explode. They never could figure that out. So they talked down their noses at R&B and the people that liked it. They certainly looked down on King Curtis. Until they tried to play with him.”

Griffin was on almost every ‘60s hit by the Shirelles, Warwick, Chuck Jackson, and the Isleys. “I didn’t work with duds. Everyone I worked with, you could see why they made it.” Paul Simon, whom Griffin backed on and off for a decade. Aretha Franklin, who showed Griffin the piano part to “Think” and asked him to record it. “I said, ‘No way, lady. You sit back down and play it like you just did.’”

In 1965, Griffin played on much of Bob Dylan’s Bringin’ It All Back Home, the first of the three Dylan albums that, within the space of 18 months, turned pop music on its head. On the second, Highway 61 Revisited, that’s Griffin on piano on “Like a Rolling Stone,” having graciously exchanged seats with the original pianist, the jack-of-all-trades Al Kooper, to let Kooper play the song’s unforgettable organ licks. That’s Griffin’s ominously rolling left-hand figure, on piano this time, undergirding Highway 61’s menacing “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Finally, Griffin figures prominently on Dylan’s masterpiece, 1966’s Blonde on Blonde. Especially majestic—one of the all-time great piano tracks in rock & roll—is Griffin’s playing on Dylan’s “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later).” Listen to Kooper:

“The best thing I can say about Paul Griffin is take five minutes out of your busy day and… have nothing to bother you at all. Find a real nice stereo system and sit back and put on ‘One Of Us Must Know’ from Blonde on Blonde. And just listen to the piano….And tell me if you can find on a rock ‘n’ roll record anybody playing better than that. I would really like to hear what your decision is. To me it is the greatest piano achievement in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

“I don’t hear anything than him playing the piano when I hear that record,” says Kooper. “And I’m thrilled that I’m playing organ but I’m embarrassed. And I think that Dylan should be embarrassed, too. ‘Cause Paul just steals that fuckin’ record. It’s the most incredible piano playing I’ve heard in my life. If you’re a piano player try playing that note for note. It’s just incredible.”

Ironic. Griffin played, masterfully, on the three albums which, if any three can be said to have dealt Brill Building Pop its death blow, are the ones.

Although Los Angeles came to surpass it as the hub of American record production, from the mid-1950s through the mid-’60s, New York was packed with session virtuosi. Listen to Gary Chester’s intricate drumming on Ruby and the Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come.” “Gary Chester,” said Griffin, “was a drummer who could read fly shit.” Frank Owens practiced études and sonatas during studio lulls. Saxophonist Frank Foster juggled rock & roll with blue-chip jazz dates.

All of 20 in 1961, Carole King was the hottest songwriter in the country. Freely acknowledging her big writing gift, Griffin eyed King’s musicianship skeptically. “I thought, ‘Why are they makin' such a fuss?' She’d sit down and play stiffly through some blues riff and all the white people would go crazy. ‘Ooh, she’s so great!’” Griffin backs off. “You know what? I think I was jealous of her. I probably fell in love with her, probably had a crush.”

Griffin’s feelings about Burt Bacharach were less complicated. “He’s a genius, an absolute genius. Burt’s dates are easy to remember; he made everything stand out in your mind. When he handed out the music, I was scared to death. I could never assume I’d be able to play it. Then he’d run it down for us, and it sounded and felt nothing like it looked. He would play the melody in octaves, the inside voices were changing, each chord had 85 notes, the meter shifted from 4/4 to 3/4 to 5/4, and he played it all with the ease of a flying falcon.” According to the music historian Joel Selvin, Bacharach would not schedule a session without Griffin; Bacharach also made it a point, when possible, to pair Griffin and Gary Chester.

In 1965, session life started to change. “Dylan was the first long-haired guy I worked with,” said Griffin, who was mystified by how Dylan and his associates put a song together. “It wasn’t clear to me why it took so long to cut ‘Like a Rolling Stone’; I couldn’t see how one take was different from the next. I thought that Dylan and what’s-his-name, [Dylan’s manager, Albert] Grossman, were the extraordinary people who’d been picked from above, so they must’ve had something I was missing.

“You got a definite sense by then,” Griffin told me, “that an era was ending. What it started looking like to me was, artists were getting a lot smarter a lot younger. Writing their own songs, playing their own instruments. Studio sideman began having nothing to do. The industry wanted self-contained groups.

“I was fortunate, I got to hang on,” said Griffin, who was putting it mildly: He played organ and piano on Brook Benton’s great, melancholy “Rainy Night in Georgia,” piano on Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and keyboards and vocals on Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam and Aja (Griffin is one of the few writers ever to collaborate with Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker). He worked with Laura Nyro and Don McLean. “But the old players, the guys who came up in R&B—“gone. They were gone.”

A talented singer and songwriter, Griffin tried for a career of his own. “As far back as the late ‘50s, I would go into the Brill Building and 1650, trying to find my way to a record company as a singer, trying to find publishers who’d sponsor my writing.”

It didn’t happen. Griffin watched others, including his then-wife, Valerie Simpson, get famous. All he won was the respect of insiders. Today, after 30 years and thousands of sessions, he writes Pepsi commercials, plays the occasional session (on, for instance, Fagen’s new album, Kamakiriad), scores a low-budget movie or two, and holds seminars for Yamaha on electronic keyboards. He recently lost his job booking jazz combos for the Columbus Avenue restaurant where we’d met.

“In my best year, I made $100,000,” Griffin said, “and I made 80 and 90 for quite a few years after that. Had I had a brain in my head, I’d have no money problems today. But I come from a part of the culture that wasn’t trained to think about tomorrow. Sometimes I want to cry when I think of all the time that went by, where if I’d just had a different mindset, I could have made such a different life.”

Some of his dissatisfaction may be Griffin’s own doing, but a big part was inevitable. Studio musicians, especially from the earlier days, are the only ones aware of their real worth. To the world, “Walk On By” or “On Broadway” are unanalyzed wholes, the creations of Dionne Warwick or The Drifters. To a Paul Griffin, they are indexes of his and his colleagues’ professionalism, their unseen sweat. The spate of reissues continues: Recently, a deluxe Don McLean set was released, containing a critical essay, photos of McLean’s wife and parents, a facsimile page of the artist’s notebook showing the first draft of “American Pie” as if it were the first draft of Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” and eight fine-print pages of “Don McLean Track Annotations” that list every song’s label, catalog number, publisher, release date, peak chart position, producer, and engineer.

There’s no mention of Paul Griffin, or any other backing musician.

Paul Griffin died on June 14, 2000 at his home in the Bronx, evidently of a heart attack. He was 62. Griffin also suffered from diabetes. Told in 1999 that he needed a liver transplant, he died awaiting one.

Searching online, I found few photographs of Griffin, none suitable for inclusion in this story of his achievements and disappointments.