Tardy Correction To The Introduction
I shouldn’t have said I sold songs in the Brill Building. I was never in The Brill Building. I was padding my resume; I was embellishing my own story. And I had come to believe it myself– that’s the scary part.
I did believe it myself. But I started to question my own story a few months ago, when I received, forwarded from my father, one of my very sporadic royalty statements from April-Blackwood Music. I saw that they were now EMI Music Publishing. No surprise there, they always were associated with Capitol Records. But the address was 810 7th Avenue, 36th floor.
So I googled “The Brill Building”, and found that it had only 10 or 11 floors. Whereas my memory of Dave Rosner’s window was of a higher vista than that… I had just assumed it must have been that building. I don’t have a memory that anyone gave the building a name at all. Just an address, a number on a street, like most buildings.
And then I got an email from someone who had been a staff writer at April Blackwood in 1972. He mentioned, among other things, that it had been, in that year, located at 1650 Broadway. I’m willing to bet that that’s the building I was in in 1967, & 1969, & maybe in 1970. So then, I hereby correct my own Introduction. I was in the (nameless) building at 1650 Broadway.
But there’s more. Further investigation (on-line investigation, of course!) revealed that, in the broader sense, 1650 was the Brill Building. That is, it was a “sister” building, songwriting-wise. Many songwriting outfits were there, including April Blackwood, the arm of Columbia Records at that time, Don Kirchner’s office was there, and there were studios there in which you could make demos of your tunes.
So, in summation, I was never literally in The Brill Building, but figuratively I was.
Additional notes, while we’re on the subject:
1) Once I found out I was wrong about The Brill Building, I started questioning all of my memories. Was the guy’s name Dave Rosner? I wondered. Google to the rescue, “Dave Rosner” yields a college professor somewhere, but “Dave Rosner, April Blackwood” reveals that that was indeed his name.
Also of interest was that “Dave Rosner, April Blackwood” ’s third google result was my own blog. Now that’s post-modern!
2) I didn’t cut any demos at 1650 Broadway. However, with professional help hired by the staff writer I knew at April Blackwood (the brother of a friend, he was; the guy who brought me in there in the first place to play for Mr. Rosner my songs) I sang on the demos of 2 of them in the studios known as Sigma Sound, in Philadelphia. A few years later David Bowie would record “Young Americans” there… unless I’m improving the story of the past again.
But enough about my hazy memories & my dubious qualifications. Resumes are good for getting hired, but the only real question is: Can you do the job? Can you do it today and do it again tomorrow? In the case at hand, can I write a song worth hearing, worth remembering, worth learning? And for our purposes right here, can I recognize an excellent song when I hear one, and convey some hints of where that quality lies?