He would scowl and look away as he went to his seventh-floor office. The sleazy songswipers of his own age were bad enough, but these hotshots, barely older than the teenagers who bought their songs, had found entirely new ways to be uncouth.The twelve-story building at 1650 Broadway on the corner of West Fifty-First Street housed plenty of music business offices. A few were even distinguished tenants, like Berlin, the man who wrote “There’s No Business like Show Business,” “White Christmas,” and “God Bless America.” “St. Louis Blues” composer W.C. Handy also kept his office in the building. But, for the most part, 1650 was rock and roll.There was nothing especially noteworthy about the building at a glance. A drugstore held down the corner on Broadway. The office building entrance was around the corner on Fifty-First Street, large chrome numerals “1650” above a revolving door. But nothing less than a tumultuous revolution was going on inside. From within these walls, insurgents were mounting an assault on the New York music business, an elite, time-honored industry established before the turn of the century.In the four years since rock and roll first struck a chord in the national breast, this awful scourge had shown no signs whatsoever of crawling back into whatever gutter it came from in the first place.
