Gerry Goffin wrote the words to hundreds of songs, including some of the most performed in the history of American pop. Asked to pick his favourite among his own lyrics, he chose a song about climbing a tenement staircase to get away from the world. Up on the Roof — written with Carole King in 1962, made famous by The Drifters, later reclaimed by King herself — is the gentle masterpiece of the Brill Building era: three minutes about the tar beaches above the city streets, where the air is fresh and clean, the stars put on a show for free, and nobody can bother you. In an industry that sold noise, Goffin and King sold quiet, privacy and a view of the stars — and the song has been escaping upward ever since.
A Tune That Arrived on a Drive
The melody came first, and it came to King the way melodies so often do in songwriters’ folklore: behind the wheel of a car. Out driving, she found herself humming a tune and pictured a private refuge as its subject, suggesting the working title My Secret Place. She brought the melody to Goffin, who kept her idea of a haven but rebuilt it from his own enthusiasms. He had been captivated by the film musical West Side Story, with its scenes played out on the rooftops of Upper West Side tenements, and he set the song up there — up the stairs, away from the cares below.
What he produced was, by the standards of 1962 teenage pop, startlingly adult writing. Rolling Stone’s illustrated history of rock and roll later singled out the lyric’s sophistication, from the internal rhyme of “stairs” and “cares” to the image of ascending from the street to the stars by way of an apartment staircase. There is no romance plot, no dance step, no plea. The narrator simply reports that when the world starts getting him down, he knows a place where he belongs. Goffin was twenty-three years old. He never wrote a lyric he liked better.
The Drifters Take It Upstairs
It is worth noting what an unlikely hit vehicle the songwriters were that year. King was twenty years old, and in the very same season she was briefly a recording artist herself, reaching the charts as a solo singer with It Might as Well Rain Until September. The industry still treated her as a writer who occasionally sang, rather than the other way round — a misjudgement that would take another nine years, and Tapestry, fully to correct.
Produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for Atlantic Records, The Drifters’ record was released on September 17, 1962, with Rudy Lewis singing lead in one of the most tender performances of his career. It arrived in the middle of the group’s golden Atlantic run, shortly before the same team would send them On Broadway, and its B-side, Another Night with the Boys, has been almost entirely forgotten — history kept only the staircase. The arrangement, credited to Bert Keyes and Garry Sherman, dresses Lewis’s voice in the strings and sophistication that defined Atlantic’s uptown soul — a long way from the doo-wop street corners The Drifters had started on, and perfectly matched to a lyric about rising above the street altogether. The session credits hold a lovely detail: among the keyboard players on the track, alongside Ernie Hayes, sits Carole King herself, playing on her own composition. The record climbed through the early months of 1963 to number five on the US pop chart and number four on the R&B chart — a substantial hit, though not a number one, and its stature has only grown with the years. Rolling Stone placed it at number 114 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and it is enshrined among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.
The record also capped an astonishing season for its writers. Weeks earlier, Goffin and King’s The Loco-Motion had been America’s number one single, sung by their babysitter; within months, their Go Away Little Girl would take Steve Lawrence to the top of the chart as well. Dance craze, soul ballad, teen lament — the couple in their early twenties were simply supplying the soundtrack of the American moment in whatever genre the moment required, and Up on the Roof was the most quietly perfect thing they made that year.
Britain, characteristically, took a detour. The Drifters’ original failed to crack the UK top fifty there, beaten by local covers: Kenny Lynch reached number ten with a faithful copy, while Julie Grant’s Merseybeat-flavoured version made number thirty-three. The ripples went further — producer Tony Hatch, who had worked on the British versions, carried the Drifters’ sound in his head when he came to write Downtown for Petula Clark, a song he had originally hoped to place with The Drifters themselves. And the melody’s DNA travelled, too: the little title riff of Up on the Roof was folded into The Drifters’ next immortal record, Under the Boardwalk.
King, Nyro and Taylor Take It Back
The song kept belonging to everyone — until its writers began taking shares back. Chicago’s Cryan’ Shames took it to number eighty-five in 1968, an early sign of the rock generation adopting it. Laura Nyro, King’s great contemporary in confessional songwriting, slowed it down for her 1970 album Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, trimming a bridge and letting the melody breathe; released as a single, it became Nyro’s only appearance on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number ninety-two. That same year, King herself recorded Up on the Roof for Writer, her solo debut album, and released it as a single. Rolling Stone called her performance “absolutely haunting,” a writer transcending ordinary production to speak directly to the listener. The single matters in her story beyond its beauty: it was the record she released immediately before It’s Too Late, the sound of the songwriter testing her public voice on one of her own classics just months before Tapestry made that voice unavoidable. Britain kept faith with the song in the streaming era, too — the Drifters’ recording has earned a silver certification there on sales since 2005 alone. A young James Taylor played guitar on King’s recording, and the two duetted on the song at her Carnegie Hall concert on June 18, 1971, in the season Tapestry was conquering America.
Taylor made it his own in 1979, cutting Up on the Roof as the lead single from his album Flag, produced by Peter Asher with a band that included Danny Kortchmar — another veteran of the Tapestry sessions — and Waddy Wachtel. His version peaked at number twenty-eight on the Hot 100 and number seven on the Adult Contemporary chart. The trade press purred: Billboard found it funkier than his reading of You’ve Got a Friend, Cash Box judged it perfectly suited to his tender tenor, and Record World called it the mellowest Taylor treatment, light on the instrumentation and perfect for beach-blanket listening. Asked in a 1986 interview which of his many covers had given him particular satisfaction, Taylor named this one without much hesitation. When King and Taylor reunited for their Troubadour Reunion Tour in 2010 — revisiting the Los Angeles club where their partnership had begun nearly forty years earlier — the song was back in the set, two old friends harmonising about the place above the noise. It had one more chart surprise left as well: in 1995, the British duo Robson and Jerome took a faithful remake, issued as a double A-side with I Believe, to number one in the UK, where it sold some 890,000 copies — the rooftop still drawing crowds thirty-three years after The Drifters first climbed up there.
The View From the Roof
What makes Up on the Roof endure is that it was never really about a roof. Goffin and King understood something their Brill Building rivals mostly missed: teenagers — and the adults those teenagers became — do not only dream of love and cars and dancing. They dream of somewhere to be alone with the sky. Every generation of city dwellers since 1962 has recognised the staircase in the song, whether it leads to a tar beach in Spanish Harlem, a fire escape, a rooftop bar or a pair of headphones on a night bus. The records it inspired, the standards lists it adorns, and the fact that its own lyricist ranked it above Will You Love Me Tomorrow, The Loco-Motion and all the rest, all testify to the same thing. Some songs are hits. This one is a place. Whenever this world starts getting you down, it is still up there, exactly where Goffin and King left it in 1962: right smack dab in the middle of town, two flights above the noise, with the stars putting on their show for free and nobody — nobody at all — able to bother you.