That's amazing that Barry Mann (with Cynthia Weil) wrote "We got to get out of this place":
Mann & Weil actually intended to give the song to the Righteous Brothers. Before they could record it, Allen Klein---then the Animals' manager
who was making a name for himself in England by doing what he'd already done for Sam Cooke, prying heretofore unaccounted-for royalties out
of the record companies to the artists he handled---caught hold of the Mann-Weil demo (Mann playing piano and Weil singing, I think it was)
and brought it to the Animals' producer, Mickie Most. Klein liked to hit the Brill Building for material for his clients (this was before he finally
became the manager first of the Rolling Stones and, more notoriously, the post-Brian Epstein Beatles); such hunts eventually brought
the Animals their last hit by the so-called "classic lineup," if you don't count that Dave Rowberry had replaced Alan Price on keyboards a few singles
earlier; it was a Goffin-King number:
The Animals, "Don't Bring Me Down"
! No longer availablePer the Drifters' version, Carole King co-wrote "Up on the roof", a very big song that seems a bit timeless really.
That's my personal favourite record by the Drifters. :)
There were several songwriting couples in the Brill Building in the 1960s: Goffin and King, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Only Mann and Weil remain together as husband and wife and as collaborators to this day. Cynthia Weil began her career working for Broadway composer Frank Loesser before she moved to the offices of Hill & Range Songs and began spending time at Don Kirshner's Aldon Music office---hoping his new staff writer Barry Mann would notice her. According to Joel Selvin, in
Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty History of Rhythm and Blues, Weil fell hard for Mann the first time she ever saw him.
Before they split up, Goffin and King wrote what was arguably the Monkees' best single, at a time after the Monkees fought for and won the right to play instruments on their own recordings, and right as they finished cutting the first album they made with that new-won freedom,
Headquarters; this single eventually turned up on their fourth album,
Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd. . . .
The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"
! No longer availableGoffin and King broke up in 1969. Goffin had once had an affair and fathered a child from that affair, but he and King reconciled. What really tore the marriage up was what happened after Goffin experimented with LSD after the couple moved to California; according to King, it brought about the onset of the mental illness that plagued Goffin the rest of his life. (He died in 2014.) Goffin eventually became the writing collaborator of former Butterfield Blues Band/Electric Flag/Mike Bloomfield cohort Barry Goldberg. Carole King's biggest hit on her own had lyrics by Toni Wine, who was trying to express her feelings about breaking up with James Taylor, but it likely did even better describing how King felt about her breakup with Goffin:
Carole King, "It's Too Late"
! No longer availableJeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich broke up, too, which devastated her, even though she had her suspicions as early as 1964, when she wrote a lyric about it for a song that was given to Lesley Gore . . .
Lesley Gore, "Maybe I Know"
! No longer available. . . but they hung in in their marriage until the day Jeff Barry moved out after he began seeing a comely receptionist at Mira Sound studio. They kept the separation and ultimate divorce quiet so long as they were still professional collaborators, though by all accounts she was devastated when the marriage collapsed. They continued as songwriting and production partners for almost two years after they broke up, in large part because Greenwich needed Barry to help her shepherd a songwriting singer she'd just discovered: a Brooklyn kid named Neil Diamond. Barry and Greenwich created Diamond's first publishing company (Tallyrand) and co-produced Diamond's first singles on the Bang label, including . . .
Neil Diamond, "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon"
! No longer available
