Canter’s Fete Toasts ‘Brill Building’ Set : Music: A party in honor of the release of a 74-song, four-CD box set draws ‘60s music veterans who worked near that fabled N.Y. office tower.

Songwriter Barry Mann seemed happy to spot Mark Lindsay--one of the singers who, as frontman for Paul Revere & the Raiders, used to turn his tunes into hits. As they met at a party reuniting ‘60s music veterans Wednesday, Mann was not just happy, but a bit in awe, too.

“You kept your hair!” exclaimed Mann, giving the shaggy-maned Lindsay an admiring twice-over. “I wanna marry you, man.”

The celebration at Canter’s Kibitz Room was in honor of the release of a new 74-song, four-CD box set, “The Brill Building Sound,” which celebrates the output of the songwriters famed for working in and near that fabled New York office tower during one of pop’s golden ages.

If Mann somehow did wed Lindsay, it might in its own strange fashion be in keeping with the tradition of the Brill Building, whose heyday found an inordinate number of songwriting teams getting hitched. Think Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich or Mann and Cynthia Weil.

Most of those teams eventually split personally and professionally--with the notable exception of the latter pair, still married after 32 years and attending Wednesday’s fete together.

Among those Brill veterans nibbling on pastrami, pickles and deli finger foods at the Kibitz were writers Mann, Weil, Barry and Mike Stoller, arranger Artie Butler, engineer Brooks Arthur and Dodd Darin, son of Bobby.

To get an idea of what’s included in the “Brill Building” box, which chronicles the years 1959-65, think of all the great American hits from the immediately pre-Beatles pop era that weren’t part of Phil Spector’s box set. Selections range from the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” to Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” to Manfred Mann’s “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” with plenty more relative obscurities in between.

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“It was just one of the great periods of rock history that we thought had to be documented,” said Owen Husney, vice president of A&R; for K-Tel Records. “It wasn’t the obvious concept for a box set like ‘OK, we’re gonna do the best of the blues.’ Every baby boomer grew up listening to this music, but the average person outside of the business probably does not recognize the Brill Building.”

“We worked on it about two years before it came out, and then about a week before we released it we found out about Neil Diamond’s new album (“Up on the Roof: Songs of the Brill Building”) coming out within a week of our package,” said Era Records director Steve Husney. “At first we thought, ‘Oh no,’ but after about a minute we realized Neil’s album will help educate the public to what the Brill Building is, so we’re helping each other a little bit.”

Husney says the Brill era really represented “the first time kids were writing for kids,” supplanting the old guard.

“I knew that we had nothing to hold up to compare what we were doing to--which was great,” said Jeff Barry (whose credits range from “Leader of the Pack” to “River Deep, Mountain High”). “We had the feeling that there were absolutely no parameters that we had to obey or were restricted by. We could write about anything and in any fashion.”