Writers
Many of the best works in this diverse category were written by a loosely affiliated group of songwriter-producer teams — mostly duos — that enjoyed immense success and who collectively wrote some of the biggest hits of the period. Many in this group were close friends and/or (in the cases of Goffin-King, Mann-Weil and Greenwich-Barry) married couples, as well as creative and business associates — and both individually and as duos, they often worked together and with other writers in a wide variety of combinations. Some (Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond, Boyce and Hart) recorded and had hits with their own music.
- Burt Bacharach and Hal David
- Bert Berns
- Sonny Bono
- Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
- Neil Diamond
- Andy Kim
- Giant, Baum & Kaye
- Gerry Goffin and Carole King
- Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry
- Marvin Hamlisch
- Hugo & Luigi
- John Kander and Fred Ebb
- Artie Kornfeld
- Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
- Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil
- Shadow Morton
- Laura Nyro
- Claus Ogerman
- Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman
- Tony Powers
- Beverly Ross
- Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield
- Paul Simon as Jerry Landis
- Phil Spector
- Eddie Snyder
Other famous musicians who were headquartered in The Brill Building:
- Bobby Darin
- The Drifters
- Connie Francis
- Lesley Gore
- Ben E. King
- Darlene Love
- Liza Minnelli
- Tony Orlando
- Gene Pitney
- The Ronettes
- The Shangri-Las
- The Shirelles
- Frankie Valli
Among the hundreds of hits written by this group are "Yakety Yak" (Leiber-Stoller), "Save the Last Dance for Me" (Pomus-Shuman), "The Look of Love" (Bacharach-David), "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" (Sedaka-Greenfield), "Devil in Disguise" (Giant-Baum-Kaye), "The Loco-Motion" (Goffin-King), "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" (Mann-Weil) and "River Deep, Mountain High" (Spector-Greenwich-Barry).
Read more about this topic: Brill Building
Famous quotes containing the word writers:
“When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B’s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the way of remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)