Vanity Fair Archives

But “Like the 309” is less lofty than all that. “See everybody, I’m doin’ fine / Load my box on the 309,” he sings. “Put me in my box on the 309 ... Asthma comin’ down like the 309.” Yielding to a fiddle solo, Cash stops singing and starts ... wheezing—tubercularly, hammily, on purpose; he’s conflating the groaning, hacking sounds of his dying body with those of an old locomotive. It’s “Hey Porter” turned on its ear, the boxcar interment of the brazen, respiratorily robust young buck who sang in the earlier song, “Tell that engineer I said thanks a lot, and I didn’t mind the fare / I’m gonna set my feet on Southern soil and breathe that Southern air.” And Cash is playing it for laughs.

Every time Cash does one of his comic wheezes, the fellow to the left of me on the couch chuckles but keeps his eyes closed. He listens to the playback intently, legs folded in the lotus position, arms relaxed, feet unshod, his body rocking back and forth in time to the music, lending him the air of a shaman communing with the other world—or, given his untrimmed beard, a Lubavitcher rebbe in the throes of Sabbath davening. When the song ends, the bearded fellow snaps to and says, “Let me play you another one.” The next recording, also from the final weeks of Cash’s life, is of a folk song called “The Oak and the Willow,” which begins, “He once was as strong as a giant oak tree / Now he bends in the wind like a willow ... ” Another song about death, but this time dead serious, and beautiful. Sung from the point of view of a dying man’s son, the lyrics conclude, “A part of my heart will forever be lost when the oak and the willow are gone.” As the song ends, the bearded fellow, Rick Rubin, still has his eyes closed, but that doesn’t keep the tears from running down his face.

In the decade they knew each other, from their first meeting in 1993 to Cash’s death on September 12 of last year, Rubin produced five studio albums for Cash. From the moment their collaboration was announced, it caused a stir—at first, just for the odd-couple novelty of their pairing: the Man in Black, confirmed citizen of Nashville, and the inscrutable ZZ Top–lookin’ dude who founded the hip-hop label Def Jam records in his New York University dorm room with Russell Simmons and later made a name for himself as a producer of hard-rock acts such as AC/DC, Slayer, and Danzig.

But no one was less fazed by the seeming incongruity of the new alliance than Cash—“I’d dealt with the long-haired element before and it didn’t bother me at all,” he commented, drolly adding that he found “great beauty in men with perfectly trained beards”—and it didn’t take long for people to look past the Bard-Beard angle and get stirred up by the music itself. The first fruit of their collaboration, American Recordings, released in 1994, reconnected Cash with his fundamental Johnny Cash–ness, featuring just him and his guitar, playing the rootsy, heartfelt material that he longed to play but that achy-breaky 1980s Nashville had wanted no part of. The subsequent albums of the American series—so named because all the sequels except Unchained have “American” in their title (American III: Solitary Man; American IV: The Man Comes Around) and because Rubin’s label also happens to be called American Recordings—were even better, mixing the rootsier material with Rubin-suggested, idiomatically unlikely songs that, once Cashified, came to be celebrated in the rock world: Soundgarden’s high-grunge yowler “Rusty Cage” re-done as a bluegrass shuffle; Depeche Mode’s aloof synth-pop song “Personal Jesus” as a swamp blues; and, most celebratedly, Nine Inch Nails’ drug-addict confessional “Hurt” as an old man’s devastating appraisal of his life, with the most stunning climax in a pop song since the orchestral glissando in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” As for “Like the 309” and “The Oak and the Willow,” they’ll appear on the as-yet-unsubtitled American V, most of which was recorded last year in the four-month span between the May 15 death of Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash, and his own passing—a raw, grief-stricken period during which Cash kept his loneliness at bay by writing and recording at a furious pace, as often as his strength would allow. American V comes out this fall.

Seldom in the annals of modern music, where snuffed promise and blown opportunities are a requisite part of the Behind the Music drama, has something turned out as right as the Cash-Rubin partnership. Everybody won: Cash, re-energized and alight with inspiration, was afforded a happy ending to the recording career he’d effectively given up on, and the world was presented with a late-period chunk of Johnny Cash music that, on its own merits—divorced from sentimentality and the wishful thinking that typically surrounds comeback efforts by older artists—stands with the best work he ever did. “It’s like Matisse doing the jazz dancers when he was in his 80s, you know?” says Rosanne Cash, the eldest of Cash’s children and a fine singer-songwriter herself. “Like a whole new level of art and depth and mastery and confidence. Rick came at just the right time, and Dad was just the right age that that could be unlocked in him. He got all his old confidence back. Only it was kind of a mature confidence—it wasn’t that kind of punky, rebellious confidence of his early years.”

For Rubin, the personal experience of getting to know Cash was even more edifying than the satisfaction he took in reconnecting the old-timer with his muse. The two men wound up enveloped in something more intense than a friendship, a deep kindredness that greatly moved Cash’s family and friends, and, frankly, kind of freaked them out. “You could see that their connection went back into the mists of time somewhere,” says Rosanne. “Like these guys didn’t just meet 11 years ago.”

As Rubin progressed from his 30s to 40s, and Cash from his 60s to 70s, the two became confidants and sounding boards on matters spiritual as well as musical—a sort of Tuesdays with Morrie scenario without the slush and hokum, and with a more reciprocal exchange of wisdom between the dying man and the younger man. Plus really cool tunes.

Rubin is not what you think he is. The long hair, the Hell’s Angels beard, and the wraparound shades he wears in public suggest a standoffish, substance-abusing ogre who speaks, if he speaks at all, in noncommittal grunts—a grouch savant fluent only in the visceral language of rawk. In fact, he’s chatty and thoughtful, with the dulcet speaking voice and gentle mien of a divinity student. He adheres to a vegan diet and seldom wears shoes. He claims never to have taken drugs, and to have been drunk only once in his life, when he took a mixology class while attending a Harvard summer program in his teens, “and for the final, we had to mix, like, 30 different drinks and taste them all, and I got really drunk and I hated it.” The shelves of Rubin’s library, in his home just above the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, are crammed with religious texts and path-to-enlightenment guides: the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, The Great Code (Northrop Frye’s definitive lit-crit companion to the Bible), how-tos on both raja and hatha yoga, Listening to Prozac, Mind over Back Pain, something called The Knee of Listening, by someone called Adi Da.

Just off the library, in the south end of the living room, stands a tableau that, at first blush, seems comic—an enormous stone Buddha statue, flanked by two nearly-as-enormous stereo speakers. But this is pretty much Rubin in a nutshell: an earnest spiritual quester who finds deliverance in both meditation and loud music. “I used to be a magician, from the time I was 9 years old till I was 17 years old,” he says. “When you’re that age, you can’t really tell the difference between magic and spirituality and the occult. They were all kind of part of this same other world. And I honestly find the same thing in music. It’s this other magic world, and it takes me away.”

Cash, though a devout Christian, didn’t dismiss Rubin’s patchwork spirituality as hooey. A fellow bibliophile and comparative-religion junkie, the antithesis of the stereotypical southern rustic with a suspicion of fancy book learnin’, he delighted in his producer’s pan-theological curiosity. Out of their frequent discussions of religion developed an odd custom, certainly unprecedented in producer-artist relations: for the last few months of Cash’s life, he and Rubin took Holy Communion together every day, even if they weren’t physically in the same place, and even though Rubin, who was born Jewish and doesn’t profess allegiance to any one faith, is not technically eligible to receive the sacrament. At an appointed time, Rubin would call Cash and Cash would “officiate,” instructing Rubin to visualize the wafer and wine.

“I’d close my eyes,” Rubin says, closing his eyes, “and he would say [Long pause, intake of breath], ‘And they retired to a large upper room for the Passover feast, and Jesus picked up the bread, took a piece of the bread, and passed the bread around. And he held up the bread and he said, “This is my body, which is broken for you. Eat, and do this in remembrance of me.”’ [Eyes open.] Then Johnny would say, ‘Visualize the eating, swallow. Feel it. Wait a minute.’ And then he would say [Eyes closed again], ‘ ... and then he picked up the jug of wine. He poured the wine, and he said, “This is my blood, which is shed for the remission of your sins. Drink, and do this in remembrance of me.” And they all did drink.’”

“Even after he passed away,” Rubin says, “I continued doing this with him. I would say that, for between probably four and five months, it felt exactly the same, his presence was much more available—I could get quiet and I could hear him say it. After that, for some reason, it started changing a little bit. I don’t know enough about the afterlife to know why that would be, but something changed. As time has gone on, it’s a little harder to do. But I still do it.”

It’s strange to reconcile this tender admission with the demo CDs by Slipknot and Audioslave that are strewn about the floor—and stranger still to think that this is the same man who wore a hellion’s black leather jacket and took a pie to the face in the goofily raucous 1986 video for the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right (To Party)”—but there’s no doubting Rubin’s sincerity, or the solace he finds in Cash’s flickering, fading presence. In darkness, having spent several hours in Rubin’s incense-scented library, I return to my hotel, down the road, and turn on MTV. Wouldn’t you know it, there’s Rubin in another hip-hop video, a new one, by another of his production clients, Jay-Z. Decked out in those wraparound shades and a skullcap, Rubin rides shotgun in Jay-Z’s car, bobbing expressionlessly to the beat while Jay raps, “I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one.”

In the early 1980s, Johnny Cash was trapped in a kind of pre-iconic limbo, having not died young enough for his legend to be burnished by the romance of early flameout, having not grown old enough to bask in the warmth and reconsideration of a sentimental public. Though he remained a decent live draw, his record sales were in the tank, and his longtime label, Columbia, couldn’t be bothered with him, focusing its energies on younger country acts. Sensing his label’s lack of interest, Cash became uninterested himself, going through the motions on his new albums because he suspected they wouldn’t get played or promoted anyway—a chicken-and-egg cycle of indifference for which, he admitted, he bore some blame. The chicken metaphor is apt, because in 1984, in a frustrated act of self-sabotage, he recorded an “intentionally atrocious” single, in his words, called “Chicken in Black.” Though he didn’t write the song himself, “Chicken in Black” parodied his Man in Black image by inventing a scenario in which an ailing Cash undergoes a brain transplant, receiving the brain of a bank robber called the Manhattan Flash, while Cash’s original brain is implanted in a chicken, who goes on to wow them at the Grand Ole Opry, and ... well, it’s really not worth going into any more detail. Columbia took the bait; in 1986, after 28 years, he was dropped from the label.

“It was a sad reflection on where country music had come,” says Kris Kristofferson, one of Cash’s closest friends. “When I was growing up, the big stars of country, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb—once they made it, they were there forever. It wasn’t like pop music: Here today, gone tomorrow. But when country music got so much bigger, largely through Cash, who was a bridge to Bob Dylan and Neil Young and people like that, it became more like pop music. And Columbia—which he built—did something awfully cold.”

Cash found a deal in 1987 with Mercury-Polygram, but no further commercial success. The only thing that sustained his public profile in any meaningful way was his participation in the Highwaymen, a part-time supergroup of crinkly country outlaws whose other members were Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kristofferson. By 1991, Cash wrote in his 1997 autobiography, Cash, “I’d given up. I’d already started thinking that I didn’t want to deal with record companies anymore. Saying goodbye to that game and just working the road, playing with my friends and family for people who really wanted to hear us, seemed very much like the thing to do. I began looking forward to it.” Which was fine—Cash was financially well-off, with homes in Tennessee, Virginia, and Jamaica, and didn’t need hit records to put food on the table.

But still, it was an ignominious end to a recording career that had caught fire at Sun in 1956 with “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” and reached its apex in the late 60s with two electrifying jailhouse-concert albums for Columbia, At Folsom Prison (1968) and At San Quentin (1969). The prison albums had been especially validating to Cash, in that their success won him the respect of the counterculture and sealed the deal on his first comeback. Just a few years earlier, he’d been hooked on barbiturates and amphetamines, had detonated his first marriage, to Vivian Liberto (the mother of Rosanne and his three other girls), and acquired an image as Nashville’s most temperamental star, notorious for having kicked out the footlights of the Opry stage in a fit of pique. By ’68, though, he had gotten religion, gotten off pills, and married the woman who facilitated both processes, June Carter, his soul mate, stage-mate, and a scion of country’s legendary Carter Family. Cash’s 1970s were pretty good, too, particularly in the early going, when he had his own variety series on ABC, The Johnny Cash Show, and established his enduring persona on the title song of his album Man in Black: the oaken-voiced troubadour who “wear[s] the black for the poor and the beaten down / Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town.” But by the 1980s, alas, as country coifs crept mullet-ward and Nashville became enamored of line dancing, it was Cash who was feeling beaten down.

Rick Rubin, by contrast, had had a very good 1980s—so good, in fact, that by 1985, when he was only 22, he was already starring as himself in a barely fictionalized movie account of the rise of Def Jam records, Krush Groove. A year earlier, while he was still an undergraduate studying film at N.Y.U., he and Russell Simmons, a Queens-born promoter and manager of the rappers Run-D.M.C. (and the older brother of Run, a.k.a. Joey Simmons), had started up the label, and that same year Def Jam scored its first big hit, “I Need a Beat,” by the 16-year-old LL Cool J. Two years later, Rubin produced the first rap album ever to go to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill, and engineered hip-hop’s signal moment of crossover into the white-rock world, pairing Run-D.M.C. with Aerosmith on a remake of the latter’s “Walk This Way.”

By the early 90s, Rubin had amicably parted ways with Simmons, moved to Los Angeles, and started his own label, the more rock-oriented Def American, while also moonlighting as one of rock’s busiest producers-for-hire, working with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Mick Jagger. In 1993, having decided that the word “def” had become passé, he dropped it from the name of his label. With that change came a desire in Rubin to sign a different kind of act to his roster. “At my current label, I had only ever worked with new bands,” he says. “But as a producer, I had gotten to work with grown-up artists. And I just thought it’d be nice to find the right grown-up artist who, maybe, is in the wrong place, who I could really do something great with. And the first person who came to mind was John. He already had legendary status, and maybe had been in a place where he hadn’t been doing his best work for a while.”

The late 80s and early 90s saw a lot of veteran artists pulled from the shelf and dusted off—it was popular music’s era of re-reckoning, a time when CD reissues and the advent of the “classic rock” radio format inspired music fans to halt their relentless pursuit of the new and reconsider the old-timers they’d consigned to the nostalgia circuit. A consensus suddenly arose that, wait a minute, Tony Bennett and Burt Bacharach aren’t elevator-music practitioners but elegant masters of songcraft, and that such dormant architects of 60s pop as the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn might have something new to offer. Then there were scrappers such as Bob Dylan and Neil Young, who never disappeared or fell off the A-list but went through serious creative funks, and who managed to will themselves back to fighting form without anyone’s help.

Cash had made a few stabs at artistic resurrection in the 1980s, covering two Bruce Springsteen songs on his 1983 album, Johnny 99, and an Elvis Costello tune on his first Mercury album, Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town, but he floundered when it came to sustaining any kind of compelling vision for the length of an entire album. “I knew he was looking around for some fresh inspiration and enthusiasm,” says Rosanne Cash. “But he’s the kind of guy who needs somebody to provide the keyhole. And he didn’t have that.”

As it happened, Rubin was not the only person with Cash revivalism on the brain. U2 had already enlisted Cash to sing lead on “The Wanderer,” the final song of the band’s 1993 album, Zooropa, and, around the same time, Cash was getting feelers from the organizers of Lollapalooza, the alternative-music festival, about joining their ragtag road show of pierced, tattooed youthquakers. But Rosanne, protective of her father, feared that he would be turned into some kind of cute artifact-mascot for the Lollapalooza kids. “I just said, ‘Dad, please don’t do it,’” she says. “I didn’t want him to put himself in a situation where he wouldn’t get the kind of respect he deserved.”

Rosanne was equally dubious when her father announced to her in the summer of ’93 that he was signing up with Rick Rubin and American Recordings. “I thought, This is odd. I wonder how this is gonna work,” she says. “Just knowing the acts Rick had worked with, it did cross my mind: Is he gonna try to make some kind of parody out of Dad?”

Acting quickly after his brainstorm to sign Cash, Rubin had gotten in touch with Lou Robin, Cash’s manager since the early 70s, to arrange a meeting. Robin wasn’t all that clued-up on Rubin’s oeuvre—his bookings for Cash were strictly for “45 and up” audiences, he says—but he decided there was no harm in having Rubin come visit backstage the next time Cash was performing in the Los Angeles area. And so it came to pass that, one night early in 1993, Rubin drove south to Santa Ana, in Orange County, to see Cash play a show with his backup band and his wife, plus June’s two sisters, Helen and Anita, at a dinner theater.

“Other than the fact that it was packed and the audience was going crazy, it would have been depressing,” says Rubin of the show’s setting. “But it was, in fact, a great show—more of a revue than a concert, a family show. A lot going on. June’s sisters came out and they sang Carter Family songs. As soon as I saw it, I was thinking, Wow—I imagine that him playing in theaters would be a much better experience. And my goal was to make that transition happen as quickly as possible.”

Backstage after the show, Cash rose from his seat to shake the hand of his unusually comported visitor, who was dressed, the singer later recalled, in “clothes that would have done a wino proud.” They exchanged hellos ... and then stared at each other, silently, for a solid two minutes.

“I’m thinking, What do I say? How do I break the ice here?” says Lou Robin. “They were just kind of sizing each other up.”

Eventually, both men overcame their intrinsic shyness and got to talking. “I said, ‘What’re you gonna do with me that nobody else has done to sell records for me?’” Cash recalled in a 1997 interview with Terry Gross of National Public Radio. “He said, ‘Well, I don’t know that we will sell records. I would like you to go with me and sit in my living room with a guitar and two microphones and just sing to your heart’s content, everything you ever wanted to record.’ I said, ‘That sounds good to me.’”

And thus began Johnny Cash’s revival.

For several weeks that autumn, Rubin sat in his living room like the musicologist Alan Lomax on a Mississippi porch, listening and recording intently while a gnarled, authentic article of Americana banged away at his repertoire. From about two o’clock in the afternoon to eight each night, Cash, with just an old Martin acoustic for accompaniment, did spirituals, love songs, hillbilly songs, old originals, favorites by Jimmie Rodgers and Kris Kristofferson—dozens of songs, all of which Rubin got on tape.

“A lot of the material on the first album, and on the first disc of the box set that we put out [Unearthed, a collection of outtakes released last year], is material recorded during those first meetings, of just getting to know each other, and him playing me songs,” Rubin says. “You know, ‘This is a song that I remember, when I was picking cotton, that we used to sing.’ Or ‘This is one that my mom used to sing to me.’ Or ‘This is one that I used to hear on the radio.’ Or ‘This is one that I recorded in 1957 and no one really ever heard it, but it always meant a lot to me.’”

“It gave me a profound sense of déjà vu,” Cash told the journalist Sylvie Simmons in an interview shortly before his death (published in the book that accompanies Unearthed). “It very much reminded me of the early days at Sun Records. Sam Phillips put me in front of that microphone at Sun Records in 1955 for the first time and said, ‘Let’s hear what you’ve got. Sing your heart out,’ and I’d sing one or two and he’d say, ‘Sing another one, let’s hear one more’ ... ”

For Rubin, it was as much an education as a get-to-know-you exercise, because, truth be told, he hadn’t been a studious Cash fan before signing him. Like any American kid growing up in the non-South, outside the sphere of Opry influence—in Rubin’s case, in Long Beach, New York, an upper-middle-class suburb in the Buttafuoco belt of Long Island—he absorbed Johnny Cash by osmosis, simply because Cash was one of those figures who were ubiquitous in the formative years of people born in the 60s, forever on TV variety shows and in the collective cultural consciousness. “I thought of the image of the Man in Black,” says Rubin. “The Man in Black was a big part of who he was in real life, as well as a mythical image associated with him. I would always try to find songs that were suited for that.”

Of the songs that emerged from the living-room sessions, there was none more black than “Delia’s Gone,” an old traditional that Cash had performed years before but forgotten the words to, forcing him to come up with some of his own. A twisted psycho-ballad about a remorseful jailbird who done killed his woman (“Delia, oh Delia / Delia all my life / If I hadn’t shot poor Delia / I’d have had her for my wife”), “Delia’s Gone” set the tone for what became American Recordings, a solo acoustic set of mostly dark songs, worlds away from “Chicken in Black.”

Rubin had originally imagined that these songs would be fleshed out with a band, and brought in various musicians, including Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench from the Heartbreakers and Chad Smith and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to back Cash on the new material. “But after going through that process, after trying a lot of things, the acoustic demos were the most exciting to me,” says Rubin. “Once we decided that that’s what the album was going to be, I suggested, ‘How would you feel about getting up in a little club and doing some of these songs acoustically? Just to see what it’s like playing them in front of an audience, by yourself?’ And he said he was open to it, but he was clearly nervous about it.”

Remarkably, Cash had never performed solo in his long career. Even at the very beginning, in the boom-chicka-boom days of “Hey Porter” and “I Walk the Line” at Sun, it was not Johnny Cash, but Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, his buddies Luther Perkins on lead guitar and Marshall Grant on bass. But on a Monday late in 1993, Rubin called the Viper Room, Johnny Depp’s tiny Sunset Strip club, just down the hill from Rubin’s house, to see when it next had an open night for a simple solo set. That Thursday, before an invited audience, Depp stepped onstage and said, “You know, I never thought I’d get to say this, but here’s Johnny Cash!” Cash, by himself, took the microphone and went right into “Delia’s Gone.” “He was really nervous about it, never having relied on his own guitar, and I was nervous watching him,” says Tom Petty, a good friend of both Cash and Rubin. But Cash held the audience rapt, and with each eruption of applause after a song, he gained confidence in himself and in Rubin’s plan.

American Recordings was released in the spring of 1994, its cover a stark, sepia-tone photograph by Andrew Earl of Cash in a preacherman’s black frock coat (which really was the coat that he wore regularly) standing in a wheat field, flanked by a black dog and a white dog. There was no title on the cover, just the word CASH in enormous block letters above his head—a conscious attempt to reinforce Cash’s mythic status; it might as well have said GOD. Martyn Atkins, who was American Recordings’ creative director at the time and designed the cover, says, “I told Rick, ‘Let’s make a statement, let’s make it as bold as possible.’ Johnny had been a bit Vegas-y, a bit Branson, for a while, and we needed to take people back to what he truly was, to the character of the early days.”

The produced–by–Rick Rubin angle won American Recordings the most attention a new Johnny Cash album had received in more than two decades, and the praise was unanimous; Rolling Stone gave it five stars, and the LP went on to win a Grammy for best contemporary folk-song album. MTV even gave some airplay to the video for “Delia’s Gone,” the album’s opener and first single, which featured Kate Moss as Delia, lying motionless as the bloodstains from Cash’s bullets spread across her sundress. Johnny Cash was officially hippified.

‘Out on the road it started feeling like 1955 again,” Cash wrote in his autobiography. “I began playing young people’s places like the Fillmore [and] discovered all over again how it felt to play for a crowd of people with no chairs or tables, standing on their feet, jammed together, energizing each other.”

Still, Cash had dates to fulfill at the oldster venues, too, putting him in a situation tantamount to that of the ’66 Beatles, whose touring obligations had them playing their old mop-top hits to screaming-girl audiences even as they already had the progressive, psychedelic music of Revolver in the can. “He was kind of living in two worlds musically at that point,” says Tom Petty. Indeed, the Nashville machers and programming directors of country radio didn’t know quite what to make of American Recordings. “It just wasn’t their flavor of what country was,” says Lou Robin. “They weren’t gonna play ‘Delia’s Gone.’ But pretty soon Americana radio picked up on it, and they liked it very much.”

Even Cash’s buddies in Nashville were perplexed, if accommodating. “That first record caught us off guard,” says David Ferguson, Cash’s longtime recording engineer. “We never imagined John singin’ just naked, with no reverb or echo. We didn’t know what to think. But we found out Rick was good for John. Here’s this new young rich guy that’s into his music and wants to turn him into even more of a superstar than he is!”

Unchained, the 1996 follow-up to American Recordings, was even more outré by country standards, in that it contained songs by Beck and Soundgarden. The first album had some songs on it by non-country songwriters, such as Tom Waits’s “Down There by the Train,” Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire,” and, most eyebrow-raising, the heavy-metalist Glenn Danzig’s “Thirteen,” but all these songs, even in their original form, fit comfortably into Rubin’s Man in Black schematic. However, there was absolutely nothing about Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage,” with its swirling, air-raid-siren electric guitars and screamy vocals by Chris Cornell, that suggested it was a natural for Johnny Cash. Except to Rubin. “When I played Johnny the Soundgarden version, he was horrified. He thought I was insane,” Rubin says. “He just looked at me like ‘What are you thinking? Have you really gone off the deep end? I don’t think I can sing that.’” Unwilling to give up, Rubin recorded a demo version of what he heard in his head, with him singing and the guitarist Dave Navarro on backup.

“Rusty Cage,” needless to say, sounded just like a Johnny Cash song when it was finished, with Cash singing the climactic line “Gonna break my rusty caaaage ... ” about 12 octaves lower than Cornell had (or so it seemed), and then intoning, rather than singing, the kicker, “ ... and run!” As he gained Cash’s trust, Rubin began burning rock-pop compilation CDs and overnighting them to Cash’s home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, allowing Cash to pick and choose which songs he wanted to have a go at. Sometimes, Cash would politely leave certain songs uncommented upon; the same compilation that had Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” on it, for example, also included two untried songs by the Cure, “Lovesong” and “Never Enough.” But at other times, as in the case of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” Cash was so impressed as to say, “I wish I’d written that song myself.”

Picking non-country songs for Cash was a fraught business, for there was a fine line between the bold reach and the humiliating exercise in kitsch. During the Unchained sessions, Cash and the Heartbreakers tried out Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” a what-the-hell juxtaposition that Rubin was initially convinced could work. “We recorded a basic track of it, and it was hard to stop from laughing,” says Mike Campbell, the Heartbreakers’ guitarist. “But the thing is, Johnny wasn’t laughing. He was totally caught up in it, trying to learn it and find a way into it. [Imitating Cash’s grave basso] ‘Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love ... ’”

 

More often than not, though, Cash demonstrated a gift for making any song his own. American III: Solitary Man, released in 2000, opened with a cover of Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” a song that, in its author’s original, 1989 version, was a casual, poppy affair, its defiant lyrics more of a premise than a statement. But when Cash sang, “You can stand me up at the gates of hell but I won’t back down,” it took on a whole new resonance, evoking an image of the singer robed, sandaled, and stoic, clutching a staff in a Cecil B. DeMille movie. “When I heard his version, it was like I’d never done it,” says Petty. “It dropped my jaw—something about the authority his voice carried. When the army and C.I.A. people called me and asked me to use it in their training programs, they wanted to use the Johnny Cash version. I guess it sounded more American.”

Unchained is the most “up” of the American albums, its full-band sound a reaction to the sparseness of American Recordings. After it won the 1997 Grammy for best country album, Cash and Rubin took out a full-page ad in Billboard that reprinted the famous 1970 photograph of Cash jovially flipping the bird to the camera during a concert at San Quentin State Prison, with the accompanying text, “American Recordings and Johnny Cash would like to acknowledge the Nashville music establishment and country radio for your support.”

Something went horribly wrong with Cash’s health between the making of Unchained and American III. He had never looked young, even in youth, but he started to age unnaturally fast, like Keir Dullea in the final weird-out sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey—his hair falling out, his forehead veins bulging, his body stooped, his hands trembling.

In truth, Cash had been a physical wreck from the get-go of his collaboration with Rubin, “in a tremendous amount of pain since the day I met him,” the producer says, most noticeably from a medical procedure on his jaw in the 80s in which some facial nerves were severed, leaving him with a pronounced droop on the left side of his mouth. He’d also had bypass surgery in 1988, was a diabetic, was prone to bouts of pneumonia, and had ravaged his digestive system with booze and painkillers. (A relapse had landed him in the Betty Ford Center in the early 80s.) “He was very stoic,” says Rosanne Cash. “He was from the old school, where you suffered, and it was, you know, like an art. You just did it—you didn’t talk about it.”

But around ’96, he started demonstrating Parkinson’s-like symptoms—shakes, disorientation, dizziness, a general weakness—that couldn’t be ignored. “It was like he was holding a team of wild horses at bay, for as long as he could, and then he just didn’t have the strength to hold it at bay anymore,” says Rosanne.

Late in ’97, Cash nearly died, his doctors unable to rouse him from a medically induced coma. As Rosanne explains it, “He had pneumonia, and his lungs were so weakened that they had to put him on a ventilator. And because they put him on a ventilator, he couldn’t be conscious the whole time. So they put him under with medication, to keep him sedated and give his lungs a chance to heal. And they tried to bring him out, but he wouldn’t come out.”

June, a devoted “prayer warrior,” in her husband’s words, turned to the johnnycash.com Web site to exhort all his fans to pray for Cash on a specific Tuesday night, 12 days into his coma. Rubin, for his part, hired a “professional pray-er, a woman in New York who was a Christian who had some kind of powerful ability,” to join in the vigil. That night, the Cash family gathered around his hospital bed and clasped hands, “and within a matter of hours,” June later recalled, “he just started squeezin’ my hand.”

Eventually, Cash was assigned the vague diagnosis of diabetic autonomic neuropathy, which is not a disease but a collection of symptoms caused by nerve damage. Essentially, his nerves were so shot that involuntary functions like blood pressure, respiration, and vision were badly affected. Cash was forced to give up touring, which left him with just the recording studio as a creative outlet. Whereas Unchained was recorded mostly in Los Angeles, American III and American IV were recorded largely at Cash’s studio in Tennessee, a little cabin on his compound in Hendersonville, north of Nashville. When his strength permitted, Cash made brief trips to L.A. to finish the tracks.

It’s a measure of Rubin’s respect for Cash that he was willing to record in Tennessee, because, truth be told, the place put the normally beatific producer in a state of unease. Cash paid no mind to Rubin’s eccentricities and appearance, and the effervescent, compulsively hospitable June adored him, relishing the challenge of preparing him vegan meals and dragging him along on her frequent antiquing trips in the countryside. But in the larger context of the Nashville recording community, “I felt alien,” Rubin says. “You know, ordering a pizza with no cheese and getting laughed at.” In one instance, the Cashes decamped from their main home in Hendersonville for a weekend getaway to their place in Virginia, completely forgetting that Rubin, who was due back in L.A. that day, was still asleep in their guest room. Rubin awoke to find himself locked in and unable to get out. When he finally was able to yank a door open, he set off the alarm system, which prompted the police to arrive and discover what they took to be an unkempt vagrant who had broken into the Cash home. Rubin protested, “No, I’m really Johnny’s producer, I’m supposed to be here,” but was held on suspicion, missing his flight. It was only after he found a copy of John L. Smith’s The Johnny Cash Discography in Cash’s library and demonstrated to the cops that he had indeed produced Johnny Cash albums, holding out his driver’s license for corroboration, that they let him go.

Perhaps because the specter of death loomed, Cash and Rubin’s discussions of their shared enthusiasm, religion, intensified in the later years. Until they got to know each other, neither man had ever found anyone else in the music industry as curious as he was about matters spiritual—though they couldn’t have come about this curiosity in more different ways. Cash’s story, as one would expect, is biblically dramatic: One day in 1967, strung out on drugs and in a nihilistic funk, he wandered into a Tennessee cavern called Nickajack Cave and crawled as far as he could, for two or three hours, until his flashlight batteries wore out and he lay down, presumably to die. But then, lying there in pitch-darkness, he had an epiphany that God, rather than he, controlled his destiny and would choose his time to die. Cash resumed crawling, blindly, until he felt a breeze, followed it, and writhed his way out of the cave’s mouth—where he found his mother and June waiting with a basket of food, having discovered his Jeep at the entrance. Rubin, on the other hand, never had any particular epiphany. Though he got no kick from the rote, ritualistic Judaism practiced by his family and was expelled from Hebrew school for goofing off, he says he always felt some sort of “yearning” and a sense that, somehow, his life was a continuation of a previous one. Whereas his fellow Def Jam veterans went through knucklehead phases before maturing into fine spiritual men—Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys is now a practicing Buddhist, Joey Simmons is now an ordained minister known as Reverend Run—Rubin found his laid-back, Zen demeanor early, meditating and lighting incense even as he went through his punk-rock phase. (The hard-ass appearances in the Beastie Boys and Jay-Z videos are mere comedy, he says, “theater of the absurd, like pro wrestling.”)

The ritual of taking Communion together arose out of a theological discussion Cash and Rubin were having one night in April of 2003. Rubin was staying with the Cashes in Hendersonville, having planned to accompany them to the Country Music Television channel’s big night of the year, the Flameworthy Awards, at which Cash was to receive a special-achievement award. But Cash was too ill to go, so June agreed to accept the award in his stead while he and Rubin stayed home and watched the ceremony on TV.

Some months earlier, in a previous theological discussion, Rubin had told Cash of his fascination with Dr. Gene Scott, a white-bearded, cigar-smoking televangelist who broadcasts out of a cathedral in Los Angeles. “He’s this old, eccentric, really smart, crazy person,” says Rubin. “He’s often belligerent to his audience. But at the same time, when he actually teaches, the teaching is unbelievable—just scholarly, brilliant, more like a university class than like a typical sermon. He did all these shows about Communion, and it really moved me. I was brought up Jewish and had never done a Communion. I made a copy of the tapes and sent them to Johnny. At first he was wary, because the guy’s really bonkers. But at the end of it, he was crying, and said, ‘I’ve heard 50 sermons on this topic, and that was, by far, the best teaching of that that I’ve ever heard.’”

Somehow, as they were sitting there watching the Flameworthy Awards, the topic of Communion came up again. “And I said, ‘You know, I would love to try it sometime,’” says Rubin. “And he said, ‘Let’s do it together, right now.’ He called and had someone on his staff get his Communion kit, and we did Communion for the first time.” With the TV still blaring in the background, Cash performed the priest’s role, speaking the words and presenting the offering of wafer and wine—“crackers and grape juice,” Rubin says, “because that’s what happened to be in the house. After that, I suggested that we start doing it together every day. We continued on doing it right up until the end.”

Cash was in and out of the hospital regularly in his final years, yet he kept on recording when his health permitted, mostly in his cabin in the woods, and, when he wasn’t up to even that, while sitting on the bed in what used to be his son John Carter Cash’s room in the main house. His voice on American III and American IV is noticeably more quavery and unsteady, a circumstance of which he was conscious and, at times, embarrassed, but it lent the songs a poignancy and drama that even he couldn’t have pulled off in his physical prime. Never was this clearer than in tracks one and two of American IV, “The Man Comes Around” and “Hurt”—a wham-bam mortality diptych that represented the summit of the American series. “The Man Comes Around” was a brand-new Cash original, inspired by a bizarre dream he had in which he walked into Buckingham Palace and found Queen Elizabeth sitting on the floor. Taking notice of Cash, Her Majesty pronounced, “Johnny Cash, you’re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind!” “It kept haunting me, this dream,” Cash told Larry King in November 2002, around the time of American IV’s release. “I kept thinking about it, how vivid it was, and then I thought, Maybe it’s biblical.” Sure enough, Cash found the thorn-tree reference in Job and spun the dream into a song based on the book of Revelation. “My song of the apocalypse,” he called it. With its spoken introduction—“And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder ... ”—“The Man Comes Around” sounds as ancient and scary as any of the old rural ballads collected by Harry Smith on The Anthology of American Folk Music, and was praised as Cash’s best new song in years.

‘Hurt” was another of Cash’s Rubin-provoked radical departures, a song by Trent Reznor, who, in his guise as the band Nine Inch Nails, traffics in spookerama atmospherics and songs about alienation and despair. (Reznor recorded his version of “Hurt” in the Los Angeles house where the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate.) Cash’s youngest child and only son, John Carter, a burly, bearded, metal-loving guy who was in his 20s when his father started working with Rubin and often acted as a sounding board for his dad on Rubin’s heavier suggestions, said even he was taken aback by the concept of his father doing “Hurt.” “I was a little wary about it, because I sort of cut my teeth on Nine Inch Nails, so to speak,” he says. “The aggression and the hopelessness of it seemed almost like a little bit too much.”

Unlike Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage,” Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” wasn’t blaringly loud or electrified. The issue was the words. “It’s a strange song,” says Rubin. “I mean, the opening line is ‘I hurt myself today.’ It’s such a strange thing to say. And then the next line is ‘To see if I still feel ... ’ So it’s self-inflicted. It’s such a strange thought to open a song with.” In Reznor’s hands, the song was sung by a junkie clear-eyed enough to recognize the ruin he’d made of his life: “What have I become / My sweetest friend / Everyone I know goes away in the end.” In Cash’s version, with his pitch wobbling uncertainly over the words “What have I become,” the singer became an old man lamenting his mortality and frailty, feeling he’s outlived his usefulness.

The song’s power made it an obvious candidate for a single and, therefore, a video. Rubin enlisted his friend Mark Romanek, the virtuoso visualist behind the best videos of Nine Inch Nails, Lenny Kravitz, and Madonna, to direct the clip. “The initial conception was to do a somewhat stylized piece—in Los Angeles, at a soundstage—and it was going to be based very loosely on imagery from Samuel Beckett plays,” says Romanek. “We were going to have some cameos of people like Beck and Johnny Depp.” But logistics sent that highfalutin plan out the window. At the time, autumn of 2002, Cash wasn’t willing to travel to Los Angeles, and he was headed in a matter of days to his home in Jamaica, where he always went when the Tennessee weather turned colder and tempted pneumonia.

Romanek and his crew had no choice but to go to Tennessee and come up with something on the fly. Rubin suggested that maybe they could film in the House of Cash, a roadside building in Hendersonville where Cash kept his offices, and where his mother, who died in 1991, used to run a small museum of his memorabilia. “The museum was in a state of some disrepair, because there had been some flood damage, and it had been closed for, I think, a good 15 years,” Romanek says. “When I saw the state it was in I went, ‘Wow, this is great, this is really interesting.’ And the idea of showing the museum without prettifying it or fixing it back up kind of led me to the idea that, well, you know, let’s just show Johnny in the state that he’s in.”

The resulting video was shocking in the exact opposite way from how videos are usually shocking—not because it featured explicit images of sexuality and gunplay, but because it featured explicit images of mortality and infirmity. Romanek discovered a trove of archival films at the House of Cash—home movies, TV appearances, promo films, all of Cash in his pompadoured, virile prime—and intercut them with new scenes of the messy, uncatalogued jumble of stuff in the House of Cash and of the feeble, tremoring Cash himself, seated in his dark living room, surrounded by his collection of bronze Remington sculptures. At one moment during the filming, June descended the stairs above the living room to watch the proceedings. “I glanced over and I saw June on the stairs,” says Romanek, “looking down at her husband with this incredibly complex look on her face—filled with love and earnestness and pride, and a certain amount of sadness.” With her permission, Romanek included a couple of shots of June as she looked on, and these shots, of her stricken, loving gaze at her dying man, are the most devastating part of the whole film.

The “Hurt” video was a sensation upon its release in early 2003, a “Have you seen it?” word-of-mouth phenomenon that elicited both praise and concern that Johnny and June had gone too far, revealed too much of their pain and frailty. The Cash children burned up the phone lines discussing it, wondering if it was such a good idea. “I cried like a baby when I saw it, I was sobbing,” says Rosanne. “June was just sitting there, just watching it, patting me. See, they had a kind of an unflinching eye. They weren’t sentimental in that way. It’s like, they’re artists—they use their life for their work.”

Romanek’s film of “Hurt” would go on to be nominated for video of the year and best male video at MTV’s 2003 Video Music Awards (and would lose in the latter category to “Cry Me a River,” by Justin Timberlake, who rightly labeled his victory “a travesty”). Cash was reveling in all the attention the video was getting when, in early May of last year, June was admitted to the hospital for what was expected to be routine gallbladder surgery. But her doctors unexpectedly discovered a severe problem with a heart valve, and her health quickly deteriorated. She predeceased her husband, dying on May 15. “It was so shocking to think—you know, all of our anxiety had been focused on Dad for 10 years, and the whole time she was slipping away,” says Rosanne.

“I think my mother knew very well that she was a lot sicker than everybody else thought she was,” says John Carter, Cash’s sole child with June. “I think she knew. And I think I had a perception that she believed that she was not long for this world.” Rosanne remembered, in retrospect, a time in the summer of 2001 when the family had gathered at her father’s place in Virginia for a Vanity Fair photo shoot by Annie Leibovitz. At one moment, June took Rosanne aside and said, furtively, “I just want you to know that your daddy and I have had a wonderful life together. We’ve had so many adventures. We’ve been so happy together, and we’ve just loved every minute of it.”

“I was just so taken aback,” says Rosanne. “It was unlike her, ’cause she was usually very light and very chattery. I said, ‘It’s not over, June.’ And then I forgot about it, because, you know, she was a little crazy. I thought, ‘Oh, she just had a cuckoo moment.’” But June was usually “fun crazy,” says Rosanne, and this time, she realized after the fact, June had been serious and on the level—she knew she was dying but kept mum for the sake of her ailing husband.

“I spoke to Johnny maybe a half-hour or an hour after she passed away,” says Rubin, “and he sounded, by far, the worst I’d ever heard him. He sounded terrible. He said that he’d experienced so much pain in his life and that nothing came anywhere near to how he was feeling at that moment. Normally, it was easy to be optimistic and make him feel better. But on this call I just didn’t know what to say. I just listened, and tried to send loving energy and support to him, and really take it all in and try to share what he was going through. At some point I asked him, ‘Do you think you could look inside, somewhere, and find some faith?’ And when I said that, it was like he became a different person. He went from this meek, shaky voice to a strong, powerful voice, and he said, ‘MY FAITH IS UNSHAKABLE!’”

Cash wasted little time in getting back to work on music. “It actually got more intense after June died,” says Rubin. “Because before, we always worked kind of casually, either whenever we had a song or whenever he felt like recording. Now he said to me, ‘I want to work every day, and I need you to have something for me to do every day. Because if I don’t have something to focus on, I’m gonna die.’”

Rubin cues up a recording that Cash made and sent to him shortly after June’s death. It’s a gospel song by Larry Gatlin called “Help Me.” Elvis Presley did a version in the early 70s, but, like lots of Elvis’s 70s work, the song was gunked up with excessive, 700 Club–style orchestration and choir vocals, the soul and emotion schmaltzed right out of it. Cash’s version of “Help Me” is pure, naked grief, almost too private to listen to. “I never thought I needed help before,” Cash sings to God; “I thought that I could do things by myself.” And then—this is the chorus, the part where Elvis unfurled the words in an unctuous croon—Cash stops the guitar, and all you hear is playback hiss and his cracked, worn voice, pleading rather than singing: “With a humble heart, on bended knee, I’m beggin’ you—please—help me.”

“He was just dismantled with grief,” says Rosanne. “And so he was just working as much as he could. But it was heartbreaking.” The Cash children were resigned to the idea that their father didn’t have long, that, as John Carter puts it, “he yearned so much to be with my mother that he wanted to just go with her.” But Rubin wasn’t having any of this. Since he’d only ever known Cash to be an unwell man, miraculously rebounding from one severe health crisis after another, he thought this, too, was surmountable.

In his endless hunger for books about health and enlightenment, Rubin had come across the works of a doctor named Phil Maffetone, a performance expert and kinesiologist who specialized in devising comprehensive nutrition and exercise programs for extreme athletes, people who compete in triathlons, ironman competitions, and ultra-marathons. “I’ve never been one for exercise in my life, but I read his book, and it got me inspired,” says Rubin. Via e-mail, he got in touch with Maffetone, who promptly informed Rubin that he had given up his practice and wasn’t seeing patients anymore. But Rubin persuaded Maffetone, who turned out to be a music enthusiast, to treat Cash.

Cash, at that point, was wheelchair-bound and barely able to see because of diabetes-related glaucoma. But within a short time Maffetone had Cash walking unaided again—“no walker, no cane, nothing,” Rubin says—and improving in general. He called Rubin one day and announced, “I’m gonna come out to L.A. for a month, and we’re gonna work, and we’re gonna continue doing all the stuff on my program. And when I get back home, I’m gonna have a party on the lawn of my house, invite all of my friends over, and I’m gonna push my wheelchair into the river!”

Rubin flew to Nashville for the last time in the summer of 2003 to work with Cash on American V. “I was supposed to be there for two or three days,” says Rubin, “but we were really doing good and making progress, kind of on a roll. So I extended my stay. And then, the next morning, when I woke up, I got the call that he was back in the hospital.”

Nevertheless, Cash rallied with Maffetone’s help, and was intent on attending MTV’s Video Music Awards on August 28, since “Hurt” was nominated in six categories (it won in one, best cinematography). However, his doctors—his regular ones, not Maffetone—pronounced him insufficiently healthy to make the trip from Tennessee to New York, and by early September he was hospitalized again.

This time it was pancreatitis, yet another complication of the diabetes. Cash spoke to Rubin once more on the phone, promising that he would be out to L.A. soon to work on the album. But he didn’t pull through, passing away on September 12, at the age of 71. “Rick seemed to be more shocked about it than we were,” says Rosanne. The Cash children had endured their father’s struggles long enough to see the writing on the wall, but Rubin, who had gotten just 10 years of Cash’s companionship, had a hard time accepting the finality. “The way I saw it,” he says, “we were going to go on for at least another 10 years.”

 

There’s still lots more from the American sessions in the vaults, and therefore the potential for Rubin to issue posthumous Cash albums in near perpetuity, à la Tupac Shakur. But Rubin insists that American V will be the final word, “’cause there’s something that doesn’t feel good about the Tupac-ing.”

Cash’s presence is down to embers now, making the Communion ritual a different experience for Rubin, a solitary one. But he keeps at it, and stays in touch with the Cash clan. A few months ago, he received an unexpected package from John Carter. Inside it was a little leather case holding a flask, a cup, a snippet of Scripture (John 6:35), and some instructional notes written in Johnny Cash’s hand (“Open the bread. Give thanks. Eat. Pour wine”)—it was Cash’s personal Communion kit. Included was a note:

 

Rick:

One of my father’s greatest joys in life was spreading his faith, and I never saw him more joyous than when he shared it with you. He cherished, as I know you did, the daily Communion with you. It seems only fitting that you should have this. You were many things to my father in the last decade of his life—mentor, defining inspirator, producer—but, most of all, a friend. My father learned to believe in your vision, and, in doing so, reawakened his own. His vision lives on, as does the faith he instilled in so many. May your heart grow in faith and peace.

Blessings,

John Carter

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The Brill Building itself, at 1619 Broadway, was a squat Art Deco edifice completed in 1931. It took its name from a clothing store, Brill Brothers, that had originally occupied its ground floor, but rapidly became better known as a home for music-publishing companies. As the 20th century advanced, Tin Pan Alley, as the popular-music business used to be known, inched its way up Broadway from its original location around 14th Street, and by the 1950s the Brill Building, at 49th Street, was the epicenter, its 11 floors packed with dozens of music publishers, and its ground floor occupied by two music-business hangouts, the Turf on the south side and Jack Dempsey’s on the north. Two blocks up from the Brill and across the street was 1650 Broadway, where King, Goffin, Mann, Weil, Sedaka, and Greenfield actually worked, for a young music publisher named Don Kirshner.

Music publishers still held significant power in those days, before artists routinely wrote their own songs. The publishers employed or contracted out work to songwriters, whose songs were then shopped to the record companies, who paired the compositions they liked with the artists in their stables, using house producers, arrangers, and engineers to get the records made. It was a remarkably rapid-fire process, and a remarkably localized one, too—the record labels were mostly in Midtown, as were the studios of choice, Bell Sound and Mira Sound. (There was even a little demo studio right in the Brill Building where songwriters could cut acetates of their songs to play for the labels.) The whole business had an exhilarating seat-of-the-pants aspect then, for teen music was still a relatively new phenomenon, as was, indeed, the very concept of “teenagers” as a consumer demographic. Yet the music that resulted was as sophisticated and urbane as youth pop would ever get—the antithesis of the deflavorized contemporaneous recordings of Pat Boone and Fabian, with which the Brill stuff is sometimes unfairly lumped. Its quality is the reason the Brill music has lasted, why these songs have been covered ad nauseam, why the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” is the most played song in radio’s history.

By pop-music standards, the Brill gang has been blessed with an unusually low mortality rate; of the aforementioned songwriters, all are alive save Pomus and Shuman, who died within months of each other in 1991, and Greenfield, who died of H.I.V.-related illness in 1986. Here, the remaining songwriters, along with some of their co-conspirators in the hit-making process—albeit not the elusive Phil Spector, who, characteristically, did not respond to an interview request—tell the story of the Brill Building era.

 

We begin in an uncertain, transitional time, the mid-1950s, when the legitimate theater is starting to lose steam and the big bands have died out. Records, once a luxury, are becoming an affordable commodity, and rock ’n’ roll is on the march. But had you visited the Brill Building during this period, you’d have found it inhabited largely by old-timers: alter kockers from the sheet-music era, middle-aged men writing for Broadway and Your Hit Parade ...

 

HAL DAVID: Who would I see there? Harry Woods. Harry Woods wrote great songs, like “Red, red robin comes bob-bob-bobbing along” and “Four Leaf Clover.”

 

MIKE STOLLER: There was Bennie Benjamin. He wrote with George David Weiss, things like “Cross over the Bridge” and “I’ll Never Be Free.” And, of course, Irving Caesar, who was considerably senior in age to everybody. He wrote “Tea for Two.”

 

BURT BACHARACH: Irving Caesar! And I’m trying to think of the guy [Haven Gillespie] that wrote “You Go to My Head.” I used to go to the racetrack with him.

 

MIKE STOLLER: It was like Guys and Dolls. The old-time songwriters and the publishers and the gamblers—they all had the track in common.

 

JERRY LEIBER: We liked these guys. We were not combative or competitive in terms of who we were. We weren’t holding up any banners saying, You’re all dead—we’re rock ’n’ rollers here! That wasn’t it at all. In fact, it was the contrary. We really admired those guys—the Tin Pin Alley guys that wrote the standards, like Julie Styne and Sammy Cahn.

 

HAL DAVID: I think once rock ’n’ roll broke through—by the mid-50s, give or take—[the old-timers] were finding it very, very difficult. And, more importantly, they thought rock ’n’ roll was a fad, and they were just gonna wait it out. And, of course, they’re still waiting.

 

David was himself a transitional figure, already in his 30s in the mid-1950s, a dad of two commuting by Long Island Rail Road from the suburb of Roslyn. He had been bouncing around the Brill Building since 1949, making a decent living as an unaffiliated lyricist, running the Brill drill of working one’s way downward from the 11th floor, publisher by publisher. By 1956 he had enough of a reputation to earn a staff position with Famous Music, on the sixth floor, one of the building’s bigger firms.

 

HAL DAVID: And that’s where Burt and I met each other. We were both there independently. He wrote for some people and I wrote with other people. Burt and I wrote our first hits in 1957, which was shortly after we got together.

 

BURT BACHARACH: Hal and I would send out for lunch—a liverwurst sandwich on rye with tomato and mustard, from Carnegie or the Stage. These are the things I remember. The window that didn’t open in the room that we worked in. With an upright piano that

was beat-up. And Hal smoking all the time.

 

Like David, Bacharach, who turned 30 in 1959, had a lengthy C.V. in the pre-rock world, having studied music theory under the avant-garde composer Darius Milhaud and worked as an accompanist with the Ames Brothers and Vic Damone. Unconvinced that songwriting would pay the bills, Bacharach accepted a position as Marlene Dietrich’s touring conductor in ’58, and he and David wrote together only intermittently over the next few years—their heyday postponed until the early 1960s.

Leiber and Stoller, by contrast, were a musical force the moment they set up shop in New York City in 1957. A pair of 24-year-olds, they had established themselves as Los Angeles’s hottest young songwriters, scoring West Coast hits with “Riot in Cell Block No. 9” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” both performed by a black vocal group called the Robins. Self-styled white Negroes who dated black girls and immersed themselves in black culture, Leiber and Stoller had attracted national attention when their song “Hound Dog,” originally a hit in the Negro market for the 300-pound lesbian belter Big Mama Thornton in 1953, was covered in 1956, to countrywide mouth-agapedness, by one Elvis Aron Presley. Commissioned to write the songs for the Elvis film Jailhouse Rock that same year, they spent six months in New York and developed a taste for the life there. When offered a production deal at Atlantic Records, the New York–based R&B label run by Ahmet Ertegun, his brother, Nesuhi, and Jerry Wexler (an ex-journalist who’d actually coined the term “rhythm and blues”), Leiber and Stoller seized the opportunity.

 

MIKE STOLLER: Initially, it was very exciting. Because once you got to the area, everything was happening. The Turf was where everything was going on. It had a clam bar, a hamburger bar, and a bar bar. And then it had seats in the back, and sheet music on the walls that had been shellacked over. If you had to do a demo, and you didn’t have a drummer or bass player, you could just run over to the Turf and grab somebody. You could pick ’em for 10, 15 bucks.

 

Leiber and Stoller hit the ground running with the Coasters, essentially Bobby Nunn and Carl Gardner of the Robins augmented by new singers. With Leiber writing the lyrics, Stoller the music, and both handling the production, the Coasters scored a succession of comedic hits—“Young Blood,” “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” and “Poison Ivy,” among others—for Atlantic in the late 50s.

 

MIKE STOLLER: When we rehearsed the Coasters in the Brill Building, people on the street knew that they were there because of the order that was placed at the Gaiety Delicatessen.

 

JERRY LEIBER: Pastrami and mayonnaise.

 

MIKE STOLLER: We ordered our pastrami with either mustard or Russian, on rye. And [Coaster] Billy Guy, who was with a Jewish lady, had his with mustard on rye. But Carl Gardner had his with ketchup on white bread. And there were two pastramis on whole-wheat with mayonnaise. That was Dub Jones and Speedo Carroll.

 

Leiber and Stoller soon became as well-known for their studio prowess as for their songwriting ability. Among their greatest productions for Atlantic were two Latin-tinged songs by the Drifters—another great black vocal group—that were to become standards: “This Magic Moment” (1959) and “Save the Last Dance for Me” (1960). Both songs were written by the team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Pomus, heavyset, goateed, and rendered paraplegic by a childhood bout with polio, was a beloved character in the Brill milieu: a Jewish guy, real name Jerome Felder, whose disability had made him identify with downtrodden blacks, and who had reimagined himself, quite convincingly, as a gutbucket-blues singer, performing in Harlem clubs while propped up on his crutches.

 

RAOUL FELDER, attorney, brother of Doc Pomus: My family was pretty much ashamed that he was doing this to try to make a living. Most people spend their lives trying to get out of the slums. Instead of getting out of our slum, he was going to a worse slum, an African-American slum.

 

SHARON FELDER, daughter of Doc Pomus: But being a white guy on crutches and braces, singing in black clubs, was probably not gonna support a family.

 

RAOUL FELDER: He had a semi-hit record that was taking off, and RCA or some other major company wanted to buy the rights. They never thought to interview him and see what he looked like physically. As the song was taking off on the charts, they suddenly found out that he was handicapped. And they killed the record. That’s when he decided to become a songwriter.

 

Pomus impressed Ahmet Ertegun sufficiently to get a job at Atlantic and an office of his own in the Brill Building. He quickly made an impact, coming up with such R&B hits as Ray Charles’s “Lonely Avenue” and “You Better Leave That Woman Alone.”

 

SHARON FELDER: And then he slowly introduced Mort Shuman into the picture, because a cousin of ours was dating him.

 

NEIL SEDAKA: I went to school with Mort Shuman. We were the same age. He was always the lead in the plays, and I was the pianist in the pit. He was the star of Lincoln High School; he was the president of the class. A great, outgoing personality.

 

RAOUL FELDER: “Save the Last Dance for Me” tells the story of somebody taking somebody to the dance and maybe not getting them. And look: [Pomus] was a man who couldn’t dance, and he wrote music the whole world was dancing by.

 

Another Atlantic hit in the late 50s was “Splish Splash,” a breakthrough song for a struggling Bronx kid in his early 20s named Bobby Darin, who was managed by another kid in his early 20s, Donny Kirshner of upper Manhattan’s Fort Washington neighborhood.

 

DON KIRSHNER: It really all started when I was in my local candy store at 187th Street and Fort Washington Avenue, and this girl I knew came in with a very interesting character. He was disheveled. He was down-and-out, cleaning latrines. And his name was Walden Robert Cassotto. And he eventually became, after I discovered him, Bobby Darin. I couldn’t believe all his talent. And I said to him, “Let’s team up, and we’ll be the biggest thing in entertainment.” I couldn’t even get arrested at the time. I didn’t know anybody.

 

Kirshner, emboldened by the success of “Splish Splash” in 1958, talked his way into a music-publishing partnership with Al Nevins, a distinguished gent 20 years his senior who’d made his name as the leader of the Three Sons, a long-running, schlockola guitar-organ-accordion combo that was Mamie Eisenhower’s favorite act. Nevins and Kirshner called their company Aldon, pronounced “All-din.”

 

JERRY WEXLER: Now, there’s a strange pairing: Al Nevins, a curator and a nurturer of cosmic schmaltz, and Donny Kirshner, an enunciator and a herald of the new music. And it really worked.

 

DON KIRSHNER: I think, just to keep me quiet, we opened an office at 1650 Broadway. It was the size of maybe a little bigger than a closet.

 

Meanwhile, out in Brighton Beach ...

 

NEIL SEDAKA: I had a lot of drive. I was from a very poor family—my father was a taxi driver—and I wanted desperately to be a success. I was not a jock. And the only way to get popular in Lincoln High School, which was a very tough high school, was to play pop music.

One day, Howie Greenfield’s mother heard me playing classical music in the Catskill Mountains—I was practicing—and she said, “My son writes lyrics. Why don’t you try writing something together?” We lived in the same apartment building in Brighton. He was overweight, an introvert, not popular in school. He knocked on my door on October 11, 1952, when he was 16 and I was 13, and said “Hi.” I just thought, Oh, it’s fat Howie. He said, “I hear you’re a pianist, and I’m a lyricist. Do you want to write songs?” And we wrote a terrible song called “My Life’s Devotion.” But we continued to write every day, and I was mesmerized by it.

I took the subway, as a teenager, to the Brill Building. Howie and I went to all the publishing firms to sell our songs. We went to [the major publishing firm] Hill & Range, and we had a song called “Stupid Cupid,” and Hill & Range passed—they didn’t like it. So I saw Mort Shuman and Doc Pomus there that day, and they said, “There’s a new publishing firm opening up across the street at 1650 called Aldon Music.” And we went in, and Don Kirshner opened the door.

 

DON KIRSHNER: So in walks Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, and they said, “We want to talk to the publisher.” And I said, “You’re looking at him.” And they said, “Oh, come on, get serious.” I mean, I probably looked like an 18-year-old kid that was taking out the garbage.

 

NEIL SEDAKA: I played 8 or 10 songs, including “Stupid Cupid,” and they said, “Where did you steal these songs?” Because we were pitselehs—we were kids.

 

DON KIRSHNER: I really thought either Bobby was playing a joke on me or somebody was putting me on, because I couldn’t believe that nobody would take that talent.

 

NEIL SEDAKA: So Howie and I were the first to be signed to Aldon Music.

 

“Stupid Cupid,” the first song Aldon published, became a No. 14 hit for Connie Francis. The preternaturally peppy Sedaka, who had been in a doo-wop group called the Tokens at Lincoln High—the same Tokens who would later record “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”—soon took to performing his and Greenfield’s songs himself. Signing a recording contract with RCA in 1959, he scored hits with “The Diary,” “I Go Ape,” and “Oh! Carol,” which was named for Carole Klein, a doe-eyed Brooklyn girl he knew from Lincoln High’s rival school, James Madison.

 

NEIL SEDAKA: We were introduced in Brighton Beach, and we used to sing on street corners and on the beach. We never wrote together, but we dated for a year. We danced to “Earth Angel,” and did the Grind and the Bump. Her mother didn’t like me.

 

CAROLE KING: I went out on one date with him! Anything you hear to the contrary did not come from my camp. But I did admire what he was doing with his fellow school members, who turned out to be the Tokens. And I started a little group in my school, doing something similar. That’s kind of what I was doing until I got to college, and then I met Gerry.

 

In 1959 the 17-year-old Klein began her freshman year at Queens College, where she met a chemistry major and would-be playwright three years her senior named Gerry Goffin, a rangy, intense type who was working on a musical about Beatniks.

 

GERRY GOFFIN: She was interested in writing rock ’n’ roll, and I was interested in writing this Broadway play. So we had an agreement where she would write [music] to the play if I would write [lyrics] to some of her rock ’n’ roll melodies. And eventually it came to be a boy-and-girl relationship. Eventually I began to lose heart in my play, and we stuck to writing rock ’n’ roll.

 

One of Goffin and King’s first songwriting efforts was a jokey answer song to Sedaka’s “Oh! Carol” called “Oh! Neil.” Recorded by Klein herself—as Carole King—it included Goffin’s sarcasm-steeped line “I’d even give up a month’s supply of chewin’ tobacky / Just to be known as Mrs. Neil Sedacky!”

 

NEIL SEDAKA: Gerry and I were in competition, because we were both then going out with Carole, or I had just stopped, and then he started dating her. He scared me, Gerry.

 

JACK KELLER, Aldon staff songwriter: All the music exploded from “Oh! Carol,” because Carole King wrote an answer song called “Oh! Neil” and played it for Epic Records’ A&R man. He calls Donny, because Donny’s the publisher, and says, “I want to do this answer record, can we have permission?” Donny says, “Send her over, let me hear the song.”

 

DON KIRSHNER: Neil introduced me to Carole. She played me, like, five notes, and I fell in love. I just heard all that raw talent and said, “I’ve got to sign her.”

 

It was a fortunate break, because Goffin and King, growing up fast, were married in 1960 and expecting their first child.

 

GERRY GOFFIN: We decided we had to quit school. So Carole got a job as a secretary, and I got a job as an assistant chemist at Argus Chemicals in Brooklyn. We moved from Queens to Sheepshead Bay. We continued our songwriting, and for a year and a half we wrote very bad songs.

 

Before long, Kirshner had another songwriting couple on his hands, composer Barry Mann and lyricist Cynthia Weil. Mann, a nice-looking kid who’d been three years ahead of King at James Madison High School, was an architecture-school dropout who’d bounced around the Brill world for a couple of years before getting a staff job at Aldon. Weil, a slender blonde Manhattanite from a well-to-do family, was an aspiring Broadway lyricist who worked in the office of the great Frank Loesser, of Guys and Dolls renown. One day in 1960 she was collaborating on a song with Teddy Randazzo, an Italian-American heartthrob singer of the era, when Mann came into Randazzo’s office to pitch a song he’d written with Howie Greenfield. Smitten with the visitor, Weil found out from a friend that Mann worked for Kirshner, and made an appointment to show her lyrics to the Aldon boss.

 

CYNTHIA WEIL: So I went up there—I was stalking Barry, I guess; they didn’t have a name for it in those days. Kirshner looked at my lyrics, and he said, “You know, I know just the person that you should write with.” So I thought, Oh! He’s gonna fix me up with the cute guy! And in walks this little girl. And he said, “Play the piano for her.” So she sits down and plays and sings, and she’s really great. I remember she had scabs on her knees and she looked around 12. And it was Carole. Kirshner said, “Well, she’s writing with her husband, but he’s working as a chemist, and he works during the day, so they can only write at night—and she should be writing during the day too. So you could write with her during the day.”

 

The Weil-King partnership never panned out, but Weil succeeded in hooking Mann as both a romantic partner and a professional one; they would marry in 1961. And soon enough the Mann-Weils and the Goffin-Kings were the best of friends—albeit friends in a constant state of competition.

 

BARRY
MANN: It was very difficult.

 

CYNTHIA WEIL: It was having a best friend, and then competing with them for something you both wanted. And feeling really guilty you wanted your best friend to lose. Carole was the least competitive of all of us.

 

BARRY MANN: Gerry was very competitive.

 

GERRY GOFFIN: On the surface, we got along well. But you could feel a little bit of jealousy between Barry and Cynthia and Carole and me—you know, about who was gonna get the next record. There was a little tension.

 

CYNTHIA WEIL: Gerry was always writing. We rented a ski house in Massachusetts, and we would all go up there together. We didn’t want to leave them for a weekend—partially because they were our pals, and partially because we knew they’d be writing their asses off if they weren’t skiing with us.

 

BARRY MANN: We were happy when Carole would get pregnant, ’cause at least she’d be in the operating room, giving birth.

 

CYNTHIA WEIL: For three or four hours. But Carole’d be writing on the way out!

 

BARRY MANN: She was like a Chinese laborer: give birth in a rice paddy, but still be writing at the same time.

 

Goffin and King were the first to hit pay dirt.

 

GERRY GOFFIN: Before Louise was born, we wrote almost every day at the piano, until Carole got so pregnant it became impossible. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” came at just the right time, because Carole had to quit her job, because she was—

 

CAROLE KING: —throwing up into the wastebasket.

 

So one night, not long before little Louise Goffin was born ...

 

GERRY GOFFIN: It was my night out with the boys and Carole’s night out with the girls. I went bowling, and she went to play mah-jongg. How Jewish can you get? I get home about nine o’clock, and I see a note on this huge Norelco tape recorder: “Went to play mah-jongg. Donny needs a lyric for the Shirelles by tomorrow. Please write.” So I turn on the tape machine and I listen to the melody, and it was something new, something different—it really sounded good. And the lyric came out so easy. We went in [to Aldon] the next day, and Luther Dixon, who was the producer of the Shirelles, picked that song to do.

 

CAROLE KING: When “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” sold a million, we went, “Bye-bye, day job!”

 

GERRY GOFFIN: Carole and Donny arrived in Donny’s limousine at the chem factory and told me I didn’t have to work anymore. And he gave us a $10,000 advance and we got credit cards, and I’ve never had to do an honest day’s work since.

 

And so began Aldon’s extraordinary run of 1961–63. Goffin and King’s hits in this period would include “The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva, “Chains” by the Cookies, “One Fine Day” by the Chiffons, and “Up on the Roof” by the Drifters. Mann and Weil’s hits would include “Uptown” and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” by the Crystals, “Blame It on the Bossa Nova” by Eydie Gorme, and “On Broadway” by the Drifters. Sedaka would chart with his and Greenfield’s songs “Calendar Girl,” “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” and “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”

 

NEIL SEDAKA: There were always at least two or three Aldon songs in the Top 10. It did wonders for Howie: he lost weight; he started having boyfriends. He really came out of his shell.

 

Kirshner, not content to be merely a music publisher, launched his own label in 1962, Dimension Records, and deputized Goffin and King to be its A&R chiefs, and Goffin to be its house producer. The first Dimension release was the Goffin-King song “The Loco-Motion.”

 

CAROLE KING: You know the very first thing you hear on “The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva? You think it’s the drum, right? Wrong. It’s [exhalation sound], “Hehhhhh ...”—eight layers of hiss. That was a demo.

 

GERRY GOFFIN: It was done as a demo for [singer] Dee Dee Sharp. It just was done on mono.

 

Eva Boyd was an aspiring singer who had met Goffin and King when she was trying to scrounge up session work.

 

LITTLE EVA: I wanted to be a recording artist—that was my dream. Carole had one daughter, Lulu, and she was pregnant at the time [with her second daughter, Sherry Goffin, born in 1963]. And she asked me did I want to baby-sit. So I said, “Well, yeah, because in between sessions I’m gonna need some money.”

 

GERRY GOFFIN: She would always sing along to the songs we were writing in our little apartment. I came up with the idea [to have her sing on the demo]. Ethnic voices were what was in. Unsophisticated voices.

 

CAROLE KING: Eva sang, and I sang background with her. And it was the first in a long line—right up to and including my next album—of demos that become masters.

 

LITTLE EVA: Gerry already thought that it would be a hit with me singing. So he took it in to them to listen, Al Nevins and Don Kirshner. And they listened to it, and, you know, it just hit ’em.

 

GERRY GOFFIN: For a while [after the song became a hit], she said, “Don’t worry, I’m still gonna work for you, I’m not gonna think about being a star.” And then, two weeks later, she’s touring.

 

Two of the Brill era’s greatest New York City songs, Goffin and King’s “Up on the Roof” and Mann and Weil’s “On Broadway,” both Drifters singles, were Leiber-and-Stoller productions. By 1961, Leiber and Stoller, after several years of itinerant office-hopping, had opened up their own suite of offices on the ninth floor of the Brill Building, where they frequently took meetings with the Aldon writers.

 

GERRY GOFFIN: Jerry Leiber helped me a lot on “Up on the Roof.” I had almost the whole lyric, but for some reason I had a mental block—I couldn’t think of a rhyme for “roof” in the last verse. I had “There’s room enough for two up on the roof”—which brings it all into a love-song context. And I said, “What can you rhyme with ‘roof’?” And he said, “How about ‘proof’?” And so, “I found a paradise that’s troubleproof.”

 

CYNTHIA WEIL: We had written “On Broadway” for a girls’ group. The thrust was a girl coming to New York, to make it on Broadway, from a small town. We went up to play it for Jerry and Mike, and obviously it was an inappropriate lyric for the Drifters. But they liked the take on it musically, and they loved the title.

 

BARRY MANN: My concept was to write a Gershwinesque melody. A little jazzier. And Mike Stoller changed it when we all got together to write. It was a good change, very commercial.

 

Leiber and Stoller also catalyzed the ascent of Bacharach and David. In 1962 the Drifters were recording a song Bacharach had written with lyricist Bob Hilliard, “Mexican Divorce.”

 

BURT BACHARACH: Dionne Warwick was in the background group. It was a Leiber-and-Stoller date, so Jerry asked me to work out the girls’ parts. He worked with the Drifters in the office for a week, and the background group worked with me for a week. That group had Cissy Houston, Dionne, Myrna Utley, and Dionne’s sister Dee Dee. A killer group.

 

MIKE STOLLER: That’s where Burt first heard Dionne and said, “Would it be all right if I ... ?”

 

BURT BACHARACH: She had a special thing about her. A special look. There was a star quality about Dionne. Those high cheekbones, the bone structure. And then you factor in that voice. So Dionne came in a couple of weeks later to sing something for Hal and myself. And she was astounding.

 

Warwick sang the demo for a Bacharach-David song called “Make It Easy on Yourself,” thinking it would be her first single. When the song was instead given to the singer Jerry Butler, Warwick, feeling betrayed, told the songwriters, “Aw, man, don’t make me over!” Which prompted Bacharach and David to write “Don’t Make Me Over,” a hit in 1962. Bacharach and David would go on to write a succession of great songs for Warwick, among them “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and “Walk On By,” and for the remainder of the 60s worked as songwriting partners—though Bacharach, astonishingly, continued to go out on the road with Marlene Dietrich.

 

BURT BACHARACH: Marlene was very much on my side—you know, the more successful, the more well-known I was, the less likelihood that I was going to be able to do these dates with her anymore. But she was nice about it. Backstage at the Edinburgh Festival or something, 50 fans were waiting for her: “Marlene, can we have your autograph?” And she said, “You don’t vant my autograph. You vant his!”

 

Another major talent to come up through the Leiber-and-Stoller ranks was a gnomish little fellow from Los Angeles named Phil Spector. Spector had briefly tasted success as the producer, songwriter, and co–backing vocalist of the Teddy Bears, a white-bread group that had a No. 1 hit in 1958 with “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” But by 1960 the Teddy Bears were no more, and Spector had no career momentum. He had, however, forged a connection to a man named Lester Sill, an L.A. label boss who had introduced Leiber and Stoller to the music business in their West Coast days and functioned as the duo’s mentor.

 

MIKE STOLLER: Lester called us: “I got this kid. He’s talented. But he wants to move away and hang with you guys—like, apprentice.” And since it was Lester making the request, we couldn’t refuse. We sent Phil a ticket, and he came to New York.

 

JERRY LEIBER: Phil was very bright.

 

MIKE STOLLER: But he was eccentric.

 

JERRY LEIBER: A lot of shadows playing at the same time. Some of the things are just theater. He’s very theatrical and knows how to draw attention to himself—either by the way he looks at you or the way he dresses. He used to wear those George Washington ruffled blouses.

 

Leiber and Stoller initially kept the 19-year-old Spector busy with make-work: playing percussion or fifth guitar on their sessions, signing him to a writer’s agreement but not paying much heed to his output. But one day, grudgingly, the duo agreed to write a song with him.

 

MIKE STOLLER: We had a writing session scheduled for the three of us, but I had been missing dinners with my children. And my ex-wife said, “You can’t disappoint them again.” So I told Jerry, “I’ll try and come up later.” And I called after dinner, and I was told the song was finished. But I did participate to some degree. I wrote, “Dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee”…

 

…meaning the famous marimba part that opens the song that Leiber and Spector had completed, “Spanish Harlem,” the first solo hit for Ben E. King of the Drifters. Spector’s rapid ascent as a songwriter and producer paralleled Aldon’s—in 1961 he produced the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me,” co-written by Barry Mann, and the following year he founded his own label with Lester Sill, Philles Records (pronounced “Phillies”), for which he handled all production. Philles struck quickly in 1962 with a succession of hit singles by the Crystals, among them Gene Pitney’s “He’s a Rebel” and Mann and Weil’s “Uptown” and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love.”

But Spector’s truly magical, do-no-wrong year was 1963, the year of the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Then He Kissed Me” and the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and “Baby, I Love You”—the chiming, cavernous, massive-sounding productions that established his reputation as Mr. Wall of Sound. Though these songs were recorded in Los Angeles’s Gold Star Studios, they were written in the Brill Building by the husband-and-wife team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Barry was born Joel Adelberg and raised in New Jersey and Brooklyn, where he attended Erasmus Hall High School. Six feet six, long-faced, and fond of western-style fancy dress—

 

MIKE STOLLER: He used to dress like the Marlboro man—you know, like a Brooklyn cowboy.

 

JEFF BARRY: People’d say, “Hey, where’s your horse?”

 

—he briefly studied engineering at the City College of New York, but dropped out to become a rock ’n’ roll singer. That dream went unfulfilled, but he soon found success as a songwriter, co-writing “Tell Laura I Love Her,” a Top 10 hit for Ray Peterson in 1960. As for Greenwich, she was a bubbly, accordion-playing sorority girl from Long Island—the Spring Queen of Hofstra in her college days—with labor-intensive makeup and the most extraordinary blond bouffant this side of Dusty Springfield.