Episode 121: “The Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las

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' versio