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(More customer reviews)Years ago I spent some time with Carole King, she used to come to the set of The Tracey Ullman Show and sit in with the band. I was a writer and producer on the program and as it is televison there is a lot of waiting around so I would chat up Carol, I was anxious to talk with her about her time in New York during that era. Ms King was modest about her contribution to that period in pop music, " For a lot of us it was just an afterschool job." Now close to forty plus years later, the tunes penned by Carole and her husband Gerry Goffin, Mort Shuman and Doc Pomus and of course, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, are now apart of the American Songbook. The author Ken Emerson has done a thorough job detailing the major contributors who were most associated with The Brill Building era . It was an exciting time in the music industry, dominated by AM radio( and payola) careers were won and lost in the blink of an eye. Those who toiled in the pop business were intent on writing not just a song, but a monster hit song and then writing an even bigger one . Most of them were just out of their teens, so they wrote about what they knew kids could relate to. If you are the kind of person who turns up their radio to sing along to, "On Broadway", "Save the Last Dance For Me", "Smokey Joe's Cafe" and all of the great pop songs of the early sixties,then you will be delighted to read these back stories and hum along with The Coasters as they "Yakety Yak, don't talk back." A very cool read.
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