Book Review: Don Kirshner: The Man With the Golden Ear – How He Changed the Face of Rock and Roll by Rich Poldosky

This semi-biography of Don Kirshner by Rich Poldosky led me to identify a whole new genre of non-fiction: when mediocre books happen to stellar stories.

The story Poldosky tells in Don Kirshner: The Man With the Golden Ear – How He Changed the Face of Rock and Roll should, by all rights, be riveting. Don Kirshner’s role in the development of rock and roll has long been neglected; for almost thirty years, Kirshner was at the helm of some of the most interesting ventures in rock music. From his pivotal role in the Brill Building pop songwriting scene, to his early melding of music and videos with the creation of the Monkees and his long-running TV show Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. 

Unfortunately, Don Kirshner: The Man With the Golden Ear only tells part of that story. As such, it’s erroneously named; a book about “how (Kirshner) changed the face of rock and roll” would spend more time with the Monkees and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.  Instead, Poldosky focuses on Aldon Music, the publishing company Kirshner formed with Al Nevins in the late 1950s, and therefore is more about how Kirshner changed the sound of rock and roll.

Since Poldosky’s work is actually about Aldon Music rather than Don Kirshner, per se, what we get is a vivid picture of the Brill Building songwriting scene of the early 1960s, where pop songwriters like Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Cynthia Weill, Neil Sedaka and Carole Bayer Sager created some of the most memorable songs in pop music history, standards such as “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” “On Broadway” and “Up On the Roof.”  What’s more, the book reads like a who’s who of big names in early 1960s pop —  Bobby Darin, Connie Francis, Tony Orlando, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney and the Shirelles all make cameo appearances,

For anyone who enjoys rock music, the pages Poldosky devotes to the halcyon days at Aldon’s Brill Building offices are the highlight of the book, offering  great insight into the way that pop music was written and marketed in the early 1960s. While Kirshner and Nevins’ song factory set-up was hardly unique, originating in Tin Pan Alley a generation before, it’s still fascinating. Poldosky describes some of the era’s most celebrated songwriters hammering away at their craft in cubicles separated with paper thin walls, writing songs on pianos. This close proximity bred fierce if friendly competition between songwriters, especially the husband/wife duos of Carole King and Gerry Goffin and Cynthia Weill and Barry Mann.

This section, however, is the high point of a book that is frustratingly uneven. While Poldosky’s interviews with Gerry Goffin, Jack Keller, Kirshner and others involved with Aldon Music paint a fascinating picture of how the songwriters worked, and provide creditable veracity to the narrative, Poldosky shortchanges his own accomplishment by offering distracting — and frankly unflattering — information about all the interviews he could not get. Instead of adding a few lines at the outset of the book explaining that Carole King, Cynthia Weill and Barry Mann (among others) declined to be interviewed, Poldosky inserts long, wandering asides throughout the book explaining the circumstances of each interview he did not get, and, in many cases, those he did. It’s distracting, to say the least, and interrupts the flow of the book.

Add to this numerous spelling mistakes, a final third of the book that feels rushed and incomplete, and Don Kirshner: The Man With the Golden Ear becomes a flawed, but nevertheless interesting account of one of rock music’s most influential characters.

Hardcover: 304 pages, including many photographs

Publisher: Hal Leonard (March 1, 2012)