Nightclub of the Day

Southeast corner of the Brill Building at the corner of 49th and Broadway in New York City, 1944-1949. Rent for this location has just jumped to $5 million per month. Inconceivable. From the Wikipedia article:

The building has been described as "the most important generator of popular songs in the Western world."...The Brill Building approach ... was one way that professionals in the music business took control of things in the time after rock and roll's first wave. In the Brill building practice, there were no more unpredictable or rebellious singers; in fact, a specific singer in most cases could be easily replaced with another. These songs were written to order by pros who could custom fit the music and lyrics to the targeted teen audience. In a number of important ways, the Brill Building approach was a return to the way business had been done in the years before rock and roll, since it returned power to the publishers and record labels and made the performing artists themselves much less central to the music's production.

Via Scott.

Beautiful - The Carole King Musical

Actors on Broadway portraying (left to right)
Don Kirshner, Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil

My wife and I went to see this show at Keller Auditorium last night. I wasn't expecting much, but it turned out to be terrific! I know who Carole King is, after all I'm old and she was famous way back in the 70's. Remember Tapestry? What I didn't know was that she started writing songs ten years before she became famous, and she's written about a bajillion hit songs.
     Don Kirshner ran a music business out the Brill Building in Manhattan. The teams of Gerry Goffin & Carole King, and Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil were working in adjacent cubicles in the same building. Don got their songs produced.

Previous post about the Brill Building.

Making Records

WarmTone™ Record Press Promo
I've been listening to KQRZ lately and I've been hearing some strange stuff. Occasionally I will hear something I recognize but it's usually stuff that sounds like it's from the 50's or 60's, but they are tunes I've never heard. And then I realized that for every tune that makes to the top 40 on the radio, there are probably a thousand or ten that don't, which makes Don Kirshner (the man with the golden ear) in The Brill Building all the more extraordinary.

Every one of those records needed to be recorded in a studio and then the recording had to be turned into a master for pressing vinyl records and then you can finally start the press and start cranking out copies. A complicated and exacting process.

Looking for pictures I turned up a photo essay on LSD about the old record making business, and then a Pop-Sci story about a brand new company making new record presses. Back in the 50's and 60's most of the records were 7" 45's. You bought it on a whim, played it until you got bored and then threw it away, or you did if music was that important to you. At a friend's urging I bought one (85 cents as I recall), I didn't particularly care for it, and I never bought anymore. 85 cents was more important.

Sun Dogs

Roadrunner

Iaman reports from somewhere in Arizona:

Had a couple of road runners ouside my window yesterday negotiating a catch of a lizard.
Went on a hike with Randy last evening, there are old mines here, one is filled with crystalline water.  The dogs Brill (old cow dog) & Pup run amok in the cactus and rocks seemingly oblivious to rattlers which this is prime habitat for. Both have been bitten.
One neighbor who has no dogs suffers with Coati running on his roof at night, and mice chewing his trucks wiring.  He miss- identified them as ring tailed cats which are  native here too.  A new neighbor who doesn't like dogs, has trail-cams of mountain lions padding around his house.  Randy's dog Pup, big german shepherd, has been ambushed and mixed with up with coyote packs a couple times. 
Weather perfect in morning till 10, then heat is relentless till 7PM.  Randy, a desert rat, goes out shirtless hatless in midday UV walking the dogs on the near vertical hills, I'm attempting to acclimate to the Chihuahua desert life.  Houses relatively cheap here,  may have something to do with no water and relentless solar assault.  Pools scarce, neighbor has one but is always on guard against monsoon winds and debris.

Madeleine de Vercheres

Statue of Madeleine de Vercheres

More from Caroline Furlong's post about books:

Another novel I recommend is Ethel C. Brill’s Madeleine Takes Command*. It tells the story of Madeleine de Vercheres, the fourteen-year-old French-Canadian girl who saved her family’s fort from being overrun by the Iroquois Nation when the latter attacked. With the help of her twelve- and ten-year-old brothers and an old manservant, Madeleine held the Iroquois off for a week. Some of the soldiers who were supposed to be guarding the fort were killed or captured along with the male habitants who farmed the land, while the rest had taken the lack of Iroquois activity to mean it was safe enough to go hunting.

Having seen her mother direct the defense of the fort in a prior raid and lost her eldest brother in battle against the Iroquois, Madeleine was not so sanguine. Along with her brothers she kept the women and children safe until relief arrived from Montreal. It is a fascinating story, and I have to say that Madeleine has been one of my personal heroines ever since I read the book. It is not a novel with which I will part willingly.

She's talking about a novel, but it seems awfully specific, so I check and there really was a Madeleine de Vercheres and she really did save the fort.