Andrew Hickey
06 May 2021
Episode one hundred and twenty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Leader of the Pack", the rise and fall of Red Bird Records, and the end of the death disc trend. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "California Sun" by the Rivieras. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a different Shangri-Las compilation for this episode, but Myrmidons of Melodrama is generally considered the best collection of their work, and while it's been out of print for a while it's coincidentally getting reissued tomorrow. Two of my major sources for this episode were actually the liner notes for two CDs I used -- Sophisticated Boom-Boom: The Shadow Morton Story contains a good selection of Morton's work (though oddly not "Leader of the Pack", his single most famous record), while The Red Bird Story is an excellent three-CD set of the best work put out on the label and its subsidiaries. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well, while I cross-checked their telling of the story of the meeting that ended Red Bird with The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun by Robert Greenfield. And most of the biographical information about the group came from this thesis. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at one of the great death discs of all time -- a record that was the epitome of the genre, and one that rendered it more or less defunct, because nothing was ever going to top that record. We're also going to look at the career of a group that are often called the quintessential girl group, but who despised the term, and at how the Mafia shut down a great record label. We're going to look at "Leader of the Pack" by the Shangri-Las: [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "Leader of the Pack"] To tell the story of the Shangri-Las, we need to return for the last time to Leiber and Stoller. After their time at Atlantic, working with the Drifters and the Coasters, the duo had had a falling out with the Ertegun brothers and Jerry Wexler over what they considered to be unpaid royalties, and spent a couple of years less successfully working at United Artists, but they'd got the urge to start up their own label again, like the one they'd run in the fifties, Spark Records. Their main reason for doing this was financial -- while they'd produced most of the hit records they'd written, the only actual money they made from any of them came from the songwriting royalties they got, which came to about two cents per record, split between them. As Leiber put it, "After a while, we got to thinking, why should we settle for two cents when we could have our own record and get twenty-one cents?" They started a label called Tiger Records, and their first release was by Tippie and the Clovers -- one of two groups that had formed around ex-members of the classic doo-wop group the Clovers when they'd split a couple of years earlier. Leiber and Stoller wrote and produced it, but the record went nowhere: [Excerpt: Tippie and the Clovers, "Bossa Nova Baby"] The record wasn't a dead loss though -- a couple of months afterwards, Elvis recorded a soundalike cover version. Elvis wasn't allowed to work directly with Leiber and Stoller any more, because Colonel Parker saw them as a threat to his domination of Elvis, but he still liked their material and would record it. Elvis' version featured in the film Fun In Acapulco, and made the top twenty: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Bossa Nova Baby"] So they were still making hits, but still making only their two cents a record -- less, actually, because Elvis always took a cut of any song he recorded. After Tippie and the Clovers' record flopped, Leiber and Stoller put their label on hold. A year later, they started another label, Daisy, and announced it with a blaze of publicity. They signed writing and production deals with Barry and Greenwich, Bacharach and David, Robert Bateman, and more, and were going to write and produce stuff themselves as well. The first record on Daisy Records, "Big Bad World" by Cathy Saint, seemed like a likely winner: [Excerpt, Cathy Saint, "Big Bad World"] It might have been a success, except that it came out the week that Kennedy was killed, and the radio stations dropped anything remotely upbeat. Daisy only put out four singles in total, because the Kennedy assassination stalled its momentum completely, and so Leiber and Stoller revived the Tiger Records label instead. They put out several great records, such as "Go Now" by Bessie Banks, a song written by Banks' husband, and produced by Leiber and Stoller: [Excerpt: Bessie Banks, "Go Now"] But that wasn't a hit either -- though it was a hit for the Moody Blues a year later. Of course, as Leiber and Stoller hadn't written that one, they didn't even get their two cents a copy for the Moody Blues record. Leiber and Stoller came up with yet another label for their company – Red Bird – but had a realisation -- they knew how to make records, but didn't know how to sell them. But they knew someone who did. George Goldner is someone who has come into the narrative many times before, of course. He had been the owner of the record labels for whom the Chantels, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and many others had first recorded, and he was someone with taste that was regarded as simultaneously terrible and great by the music industry, for one reason -- the stuff he liked matched uncannily what the average fourteen-year-old girl enjoyed. And this is something that needs to be emphasised at this point -- we've looked quite a bit at what are termed "girl groups" in recent months, but it's important to note that that wasn't what they were called at the time -- they were just vocal groups, rock and roll singers, just like any other rock and roll singers. The distinction between "girl groups" and doo-wop singers -- and the distinction between both of those and rock music more generally -- is something that was imposed in the seventies, mostly by male music journalists, as part of a process of revisionist history which retroactively defined rock and roll as music made by white male singer-instrumentalists. But what is very definitely the case is that immediately before the British invasion, the American music industry was in a position it had never really been before, and hasn't been since, in that not only were the audience predominantly teenage girls, but the industry was making money by selling recordings *by* teenage girls, singing about the things that teenage girls cared about. The power was still all with the older men who owned the record companies and produced the records, of course, but this was the high point for the active involvement of the target demographic in making the records they were being sold. Once the Beatles hit and were properly assimilated into the industry, the record companies started to concentrate on selling young male performers, but at this time, more than any other, having a feeling for what teenage girls liked was an advantage, and that was something that George Goldner absolutely had. Jerry Leiber had gone out for a drink and bumped into Hy Weiss, the owner of a medium-sized record label, who introduced him to Goldner. Goldner was, at the time, short of money, as his gambling habit had once again caught up to him, and he was begging Weiss for a job, and Weiss was using this as a way of making himself look important in front of Leiber, mocking Goldner, blowing smoke in his face, and saying things like "Would you pay this schmuck $350 a week?" while Goldner plaintively insisted he was worth at least five hundred. When Weiss went off to the toilet, Leiber offered Goldner something better than a job -- he offered him an equal share in what was at that point a failing business, but one that could pay him more than that three hundred and fifty dollars, if he could find a hit. He'd get the share only if the first record he picked out was a hit for the label. Goldner went up to Red Bird's offices, and listened through all the acetates overnight, and in the morning he was absolutely certain that he'd found a sure-fire hit. So sure he said he'd bet his life on it. This horrified Leiber, as the record was one that he thought was utterly dreadful, and the worst thing that the label had. "Chapel of Love" had been a song that Barry and Greenwich had written with Phil Spector, and Spector had cut a version of it with Darlene Love on lead vocal: [Excerpt, Darlene Love, "Chapel of Love"] However, at the time, Spector would record vastly more material than he could actually use, and he didn't release that track. Barry and Greenwich had thought that the song still had some potential, and when they started working at Red Bird they'd brought it in for a new group they were working with, the Mel-Tones. Leiber had hated the song, but Stoller had thought there was something to it, and had worked on the session. With most records on Red Bird, there is more than a little disagreement as to who did what. This one is credited as a Leiber and Stoller production, but Leiber freely admitted that he had nothing to do with a record he loathed. The production was by some combination of Stoller, Barry, and Greenwich, while the arrangement was some combination of Stoller, Greenwich, Wardell Quezergue [kaz-air] and Joe Jones, a New Orleans musician whose ba
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