Rock steady

Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era
By Ken Emerson
Viking, 334 pp., illustrated, $25.95

Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix
By Charles R. Cross
Hyperion, 400 pp., $24.95

Made in the UK: The Music of Attitude 1977-1983
By Janette Beckman
Powerhouse, 132 pp., $35

The Brill Building is a place -- 1619 Broadway, to be precise -- but it is also an idea: the idea of a hit factory, a capitalist hothouse from which chart-busting platters come whizzing out like Frisbees. Ken Emerson's superb ''Always Magic in the Air" chronicles the rise and fall of a set of songwriting teams associated with the Brill Building sound, which ruled radio for almost a decade from the mid-'50s forward. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Carole King and Gerry Goffin -- these partnerships and others like them were responsible for half the great tunes that still smolder and pop deep in the damaged memory banks of rock 'n' roll: ''Jailhouse Rock," ''Walk On By," ''You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'." Mostly Jewish, mostly from Brooklyn, the hit makers were a pleasingly nonromantic crew. Business was their business; stale rooms and watched clocks were the handmaidens to their art. Pomus wrote smash after smash for Elvis without ever meeting him or seeing him perform live. So did Leiber and Stoller, until they got too creative and were told to interfere no further in ''the process known as Elvis Presley."

Skeptical, witty, in love with the music, Emerson is the ideal companion for this narrative. He describes the slow blues ''Still in Love," which Pomus wrote for Big Joe Turner, as being ''as blunt, balanced, alliterative, and concise as a dispatch from Julius Caesar." And here he is on the ''sonic adventure of the Drifters," ''There Goes My Baby," written and produced by Leiber and Stoller: ''Suspended between the churning violins and cello and the timpani's hollow thud, the lead vocal seems to echo out of some desolate limbo." This is the kind of writing that enhances appreciation; back to the music you go, to thrill again at that hostile chasm of violins, those frowning timpanis, and poor Ben E. King clinging to his tune with barely a bass line for company.

The original Brill Building phenomenon, as Emerson records, was more or less swept away by the '60s. Goffin was literally driven insane by the unforgiving brilliance of Bob Dylan, and took to delivering ''schizophrenic tirades" -- in the manner of Dylan's ''Subterranean Homesick Blues" -- while reportedly cultivating a large drug habit. (He survived, improbably, to write ''Saving All My Love for You" for Whitney Houston in the '80s.) The Monkees, originally conceived in the boardroom as a Beatles/Byrds jingle-jangle package for teenyboppers, cozily psychedelic, with their songs all written for them, went haywire and autonomous. The thuggishness of these nice little Monkees, these proto-Muppets, is quite a revelation: Micky Dolenz tipping a Coke over his producer, Mike Nesmith putting his fist through a wall and saying ''That could have been your face" to a record company lawyer . . . Beautiful stuff.

One bizarrerie thrown up by the changing times was the 1967 tour featuring the Monkees and Jimi Hendrix --a pairing that Hendrix's latest biographer, Charles Cross, calls ''one of the oddest in the annals of rock history." Hendrix, the incendiary genius who was born in Seattle in 1942 and died 28 years later in London, having shifted the routes by which sound enters the world, is sensitively handled in Cross's ''Room Full of Mirrors." The Hendrix whom we meet in Cross's pages is a lonelier one than we have met before -- a dreamy, stammering boy nicknamed ''Buster," who walked with pigeon toes because nobody ever bought him the right shoes and who thought his dead mother was an angel. If his father, Al, was not the worst father ever, he was certainly the worst father available at the time. Angry, boozy, violent, unloving -- zoom in on any moment in the Hendrix story, from childhood poverty in the streets of Seattle to superstar manhood, and there's Al in the background, patiently adding another brick to the monumental edifice of his neglect. ''Room Full of Mirrors" tells this story very well, and the atmosphere of sadness generated by its opening chapters never dissipates -- as it doubtless didn't for Hendrix himself -- even in the pleasure-vortex of swinging London or the haze of Monterey and Woodstock. (Cross, who has also written a biography of Kurt Cobain, clearly has a feeling for the lost boys of the Pacific Northwest.)

When it comes to Hendrix's music, though, Cross inexplicably absents himself. There is no significant discussion of the influences that went into it or the effects it produced, and little in the way of illumination as to how it was actually made. Stylistically, Hendrix music is where the old embedded sadness and defiance of the blues meet a furious stream of information from the future -- ethereal static, new weapons and chemicals, technology's song to itself. He didn't just play guitar, he played the current that ran through the guitar: the story of his demonic compact with electricity, enabled by the acoustic whiz Roger Mayer (who saw a Hendrix set at London's Bag O' Nails and volunteered to build him an exclusive set of effects boxes), is a book in itself, or at least a chapter. Cross gives it three passing mentions that total barely a page.

And how can he resist the urge to fling adjectives, Jackson Pollock-like, at the extravagance of the Hendrix oeuvre? The occasions for great prose troop mutely by: the dinosaur lurch of ''Purple Haze," the torched flamenco of ''All Along the Watchtower" (''magnificent," says Cross), ''Little Wing" (also ''magnificent"). ''Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)," that shaman's pyre of a song, is not mentioned at all. Cross may be making the modest assumption that if you're reading a biography of Hendrix, you don't need him to tell you what ''Purple Haze" sounds like -- if so, he is in error for two reasons. First, the more times ''Purple Haze" is heard the more urgent becomes the need for it to be written about in a new way. And second, the essence of Hendrix -- his misery, his anger, his visions, and his libido -- was in the sounds he made, which makes them the proper province of a biographer. Cross's unwillingness to go there is a rather large defect in an otherwise exemplary piece of work.

As the '60s blew away the '50s, so -- inevitably -- were the '60s blown away by punk rock. Janette Beckman's photobook ''Made in the UK" is an efficient and well-produced tour of British punk. Unfortunately subtitled ''The Music of Attitude 1977-1983," it actually records the last moment before ''attitude" was processed into a commercial quantity, before the words ''in your face" became a copywriter's cliche. The ace faces are represented -- Dee Dee Ramone in midair, the Sex Pistols leering out of a dumpster -- but the more eloquent images tend to be those entitled simply ''Punks, London" or ''Ska girls, Coventry." Sharp-eyed, badly fed, and bristling with punk's urchin entitlement, Beckman's nameless subjects regard us from out of a state of savage innocence, a place where the ghosts of adolescent wildness summoned by Brill Building duo Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich for the Shangri-Las' ''Out in the Streets" -- ''He grew up on the sidewalk, streetlights shining above / He grew up with no one to love" -- were, for the briefest of times, visible and fully real.

James Parker is the author of ''Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins." He lives in Brookline.