Paul Williams, the songwriter and the president of ASCAP, stopped by the Brill Building not long ago, went up to the sixth floor, and stood outside an opaque glass door with the words “St. Nicholas Music Inc.” in rusty gold paint on the transom. The last small music publisher left in the Brill Building, which served as the hit factory for American pop songs in the early sixties, St. Nicholas had to go: it was moving to the Studio 54 building, a few blocks uptown. The building’s new owners are clearing old tenants out, and the small warrens where songwriting teams such as Pomus and Shuman, and Leiber and Stoller, once banged out songs are being razed, in the hope that open floors will attract a big tech company.
At seventy-three, Williams, a lyricist on a handful of hits in the seventies (“Rainy Days and Mondays” may be his masterpiece), is enjoying an improbable renaissance as a songwriter: he shared the 2014 Grammy for Album of the Year with Daft Punk for “Random Access Memories.” Sure, the French electronic wizards were mainly responsible for the album, but they invited Williams to contribute, and in making the acceptance speech he became the face of the faceless duo. And what a face—a cross between Ezra Pound and Burl Ives, in rose-tinted specs. To anyone who remembers the corduroyed munchkin who used to pop up regularly on the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, it’s some transformation.
Since 2009, ASCAP has been one of Williams’s main gigs. At the Brill Building, he noted that St. Nicholas Music was the living embodiment of ASCAP’s mission: to insure that its members are fairly paid when their work is used commercially, whether on the radio or in a restaurant or at a basketball game. St. Nicholas owns the copyrights to four classic Christmas songs written by the late Johnny Marks: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Silver and Gold,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Marks died in 1985, but song copyrights live on for decades after the writer’s death. ASCAP has sent plenty of whopping performance royalty checks through the mail slot of this door. “Rudolph” is the second-best-selling Christmas single of all time, after “White Christmas.”
Williams’s plan had been simply to photograph the door. But all at once it opened, and a tall man with longish gray hair emerged from the gloom.
“May I help you?”
He was Michael Marks, the composer’s last surviving child, now sixty-five. (“I was born the same year ‘Rudolph’ was written.”) He invited Williams in.
It was like stepping through a time portal. The walls bore layers of peeling paint from different eras. From the back windows, one half expected to see Broadway Danny Rose going down Forty-ninth Street. Every chair and flat surface, including the upright piano where Johnny Marks wrote some of his tunes, groaned under sheet music, Christmas songbooks, and old trade magazines.
“There it is!” Williams cried, spying Johnny Marks’s ASCAP membership certificate, dated 1940, hanging on the wall. “It’s as old as the Consent Decree!” (The Consent Decree regulates ASCAP’s right to collect and distribute licensing fees.)
“The Consent Decree is a joke!” Marks declared, with some heat. Williams allowed that it needed to be revised for the digital age, as did some other aspects of the rights organization, which is celebrating its centennial this year. Mentioning Pandora, ASCAP’s principal legal adversary these days (the Internet radio service wants to pay songwriters lower rates), Williams said, “We want a future where everyone can thrive.”
Marks replied, “I’m sure Pandora would happily thrive without paying a dime to songwriters if they could!” He added, “All I know is our royalties from CD sales go down every year.”
Williams said that every songwriter who has ever lived, including Phil Spector and John Lennon, wanted to write a hit Christmas song, because it pays perennially.
Marks replied, “My dad was always frustrated being the Christmas-song guy. He wrote a lot of different songs.” He gestured toward the enormous piles of Rudolphiana he was sorting through in preparation for the move. “But Christmas was all anybody ever wanted from him.” ♦