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"I knew all about Leiber and Stoller. They were those bad white boys who wrote the blackest songs this side of the Mississippi. I loved what they did."
-- Ray Charles
Jerry Leiber died this week at 78, being born just two or three years before Elvis. I know the songwriting team because they played a significant role in helping to consolidate Elvis's place in rock and roll legend, writing some early key songs for him.
I'm a little surprised that there was not a bigger news splash about his passing, but I wonder if the thinking is that Stoller, who was born in the same year as his partner Leiber, will probably die soon as well, and so the media are going to save their big obit guns until he passes, marking the legendary team together, which seems fitting enough.
_ _ _
Listing the great rock ‘n’ roll songs that Jerry Leiber wrote, mostly with his partner Mike Stoller, is listing rock ‘n’ roll: there’s “Hound Dog,” which Big Mama Thornton recorded, powerfully, and then Elvis Presley rerecorded, definitively; “Jailhouse Rock,” also Elvis; “Yakety Yak,” “Poison Ivy,” “Charlie Brown,” and almost two dozen more Coasters classics; “Stand By Me” (with Ben E. King); “Spanish Harlem” (with Phil Spector); “On Broadway” (with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill). Leiber was a senior at Fairfax High in Los Angeles when he and Stoller first started to collaborate, and the two of them wrote fleet, funny R. & B. songs that became, thanks to millions of white teen-agers, cornerstones of what was not yet quite rock ‘n’ roll. Leiber and Stoller took race out of the equation by putting race in it—as Leiber, in 1990, told David Fricke of Rolling Stone, “I felt black. I was, as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons…. We lived a black lifestyle as young guys. We had black girlfriends for years.” Leiber died yesterday at seventy-eight; he is survived by his songs, and will be forever.
-- Ben Greenman at The New Yorker
-- Ray Charles
Jerry Leiber died this week at 78, being born just two or three years before Elvis. I know the songwriting team because they played a significant role in helping to consolidate Elvis's place in rock and roll legend, writing some early key songs for him.
I'm a little surprised that there was not a bigger news splash about his passing, but I wonder if the thinking is that Stoller, who was born in the same year as his partner Leiber, will probably die soon as well, and so the media are going to save their big obit guns until he passes, marking the legendary team together, which seems fitting enough.
_ _ _
Listing the great rock ‘n’ roll songs that Jerry Leiber wrote, mostly with his partner Mike Stoller, is listing rock ‘n’ roll: there’s “Hound Dog,” which Big Mama Thornton recorded, powerfully, and then Elvis Presley rerecorded, definitively; “Jailhouse Rock,” also Elvis; “Yakety Yak,” “Poison Ivy,” “Charlie Brown,” and almost two dozen more Coasters classics; “Stand By Me” (with Ben E. King); “Spanish Harlem” (with Phil Spector); “On Broadway” (with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill). Leiber was a senior at Fairfax High in Los Angeles when he and Stoller first started to collaborate, and the two of them wrote fleet, funny R. & B. songs that became, thanks to millions of white teen-agers, cornerstones of what was not yet quite rock ‘n’ roll. Leiber and Stoller took race out of the equation by putting race in it—as Leiber, in 1990, told David Fricke of Rolling Stone, “I felt black. I was, as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons…. We lived a black lifestyle as young guys. We had black girlfriends for years.” Leiber died yesterday at seventy-eight; he is survived by his songs, and will be forever.
-- Ben Greenman at The New Yorker
