 |
| Leiber, Elvis and Stoller |
By Marc Myers
Jerry Leiber wasn't the most artful lyricist in U.S. music history, but he certainly was among the most visionary and authentic. Leiber, who died on Monday in Los Angeles at age 78, was rock 'n' roll's first major wordsmith. (click below to read more)
With an ear for R&B and urban youth culture of the early and mid-1950s, Leiber had the good sense to keep his stories simple and quirky. He wasn't either of those two things, of course, but he was shrewd enough to know that R&B and rock 'n' roll were about singles, and that singles were about the beat and the passion and charisma of the artists who recorded them.
Leiber also knew that recording artists would have no trouble slipping inside and hard-selling the songs to the top of the charts if he could craft an edgy story that was rich with tongue-in-cheek imagery and easy-to-remember lyrics, like these from "Fools Fall in Love": "They've got their love torches burning / When they should be playing it cool / I used to laugh but now I'm the same / Take a look at a brand new fool." His earthy approach, inside knowledge of R&B and knack for novel wordplay turned out to be pure hit magic.
On song after song, starting in 1952, his winning narrative formula touched off a revolution among record companies and lyricists. He and his songwriting partner, Mike Stoller, composed hundreds of tightly wound hit songs, including "Kansas City" (1959), "Hound Dog" (1956), "Jailhouse Rock" (1957), "Yakety Yak" (1958), "Stand by Me" (1961), "Love Potion #9" (1959) and Peggy Lee's faux autobiographical "Is That All There Is?" (1969). In 1957 alone, the duo had 11 hits on Billboard's pop chart.
In some respects, Leiber's light touch as a lyricist and his willingness to embrace R&B's demand for repetition came from his early admiration for Cole Porter and George Gershwin. Both Leiber and Mr. Stoller were in such awe of the American Songbook masters that they viewed their own work as disposable contributions to a world being reshaped by vinyl records, car-radio speakers and portable phonographs.
As Mr. Stoller related in Ken Emerson's book "Always Magic in the Air," "these records were like newspapers or magazines in that they'd last a month and then they'd be gone." Leiber and Mr. Stoller assumed that every great song had already been written and that what they were doing was never going to last long.
Jerry Leiber was born in Baltimore in 1933. When his father died in 1938, his mother attempted to run the family's general store in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. But she lacked her husband's business smarts, and in 1945 the Leibers moved to Los Angeles, arriving by Greyhound bus.
With World War II ending, Los Angeles was a hotbed of shifting music styles. It had long been a winter haven for major big bands, and small-group jazz was fast emerging as the dominant style in the city's many clubs. Bebop, a New York style of jazz, hadn't yet permeated the Los Angeles scene, but R&B had. Many independent record labels began to set up shop to tap into the growing number of artists who had joined the black migration to Southern California for work at the region's many war plants.
After hearing a record on the radio by blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon, Leiber decided he wanted to spend his career writing R&B lyrics. In high school in 1950, he took a job at a local record shop frequented by record promoters who hustled for small independent labels. One of these promoters was Lester Sill.
Through Sill, Leiber found Mr. Stoller, a young classically trained pianist. Mr. Stoller had grown up in New York listening to jazz and had even taken piano lessons from James P. Johnson. He, too, was fond of the blues.
Though Leiber had to sell Mr. Stoller on the virtues of songwriting, the pair quickly set to work. They began by creating songs for black R&B artists such as Witherspoon, Charles Brown and Ray Charles, singers who recorded for Atlantic and other smaller labels. Through Sill, Leiber and Mr. Stoller were introduced to the drummer Johnny Otis, one of the West Coast's driving R&B forces in the 1940s and '50s.
Mr. Otis let the writing team hear the acts he was producing, including Big Mama Thornton. Inspired by Thornton's girth and bossy demeanor, Leiber and Mr. Stoller wrote "Hound Dog" in 12 minutes. In 1956, the song made its way into the repertoire of Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, a Las Vegas lounge act. Elvis Presley happened to hear the group sing it during his engagement at the Frontier Hotel and incorporated it into his own act. Presley recorded "Hound Dog" in July 1956, and the song reached No. 1 on Billboard's pop singles chart in September.
Riding high, Leiber and Mr. Stoller were hired to write for Presley's movie "Jailhouse Rock" in 1957. Locked in a hotel room by movie executives, they came up with four songs, including the title hit. In the wake of their second No. 1 for Presley, the workload picked up and Leiber and Mr. Stoller shifted their base of operations to New York's Brill Building.
Fortunately, the two were fast writers and able to crank out hits for a wide range of black and white R&B and pop-rock groups. Leiber would write the lyrics to more than two-dozen songs for Presley alone, including the title songs for many of his films. Leiber also wrote the words for songs recorded by dozens of groups and individual artists. Leiber and Mr. Stoller were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
"Everything they did was down," the music producer Jerry Wexler said in a documentary on the songwriting duo. "It was funk, it was street. And it was authentic."
Mr. Myers writes about jazz, R&B and rock daily at JazzWax.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment