How many thousands of books are published in America every year? And of those how many does the world actually need?
Here is a book the world has needed for many decades –Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s own story in well-arranged, wildly readable words. Short, punchy, as irresistible as a Leiber/Stoller song.
Some say Leiber and Stoller invented rock ’n’ roll.
I don’t think so. I think that honor should go –if to anyone –to Sam Phillips of Memphis’ Sun Records, who recorded all sorts of great black blues musicians but yearned and searched high and low for a white performer with a black feel to conquer American popular music. What happened when he found Elvis Presley ultimately transformed world culture in a way we’re still beginning to understand.
So Leiber and Stoller may not have actually invented rock ’n’ roll. But they WERE rock ’n’ roll –the very first to be in America, long before Elvis. They were the mass culture marriage of black America and white America in ways that even jazz and swing never thought of.
Born a few months apart in 1933, they met in Los Angeles as mutual admirers of boogie woogie, the blues and so much of what once used to be relegated in America to “race records.”
They were “the original cool cats,” promoter, producer and singer Steve Tyrell told Ken Emerson in Emerson’s amazing book “Always Magic in the Air.” “Mr. Disorderly Conduct and the Man from Another Planet,” they’re called by Atlantic Records’ patriarchal honcho Jerry Wexler in his book “Rhythm and the Blues” (it is Wexler, by the way, who is usually credited with inventing the phrase “rhythm and blues” to describe, among other things, the first music that Leiber and Stoller wrote with such crazy panache).
Wrote Emerson: “Manic, impetuous and aggressive, Leiber was a motormouth with curly red hair. One eye was blue, the other was brown, and there was a crazy glint in both of them. (Asked what he put down for eye color on his passport, Leiber told a friend ‘assorted.’ ”)
Stoller, wrote Wexler, “was the taciturn virtuoso, an enigmatic keyboard wizard who looked as if he’d just arrived from Venus or Jupiter. He had formal musical training and a taste for jazz piano.”
What resulted, wrote Wexler, was “a comic spin to their musical vignettes, their reflections on black American life, their witty lyrics, their gritty syncopations…Creators of fantastic characters, they were fantastic characters themselves. Their place is secure in the annals of pop. Their roots a combination of barroom blues and radio programs of their late-’40s childhood.”
When they first met, writes Leiber in one of the alternating Leiber and Stoller sections of “Hound Dog,” “I saw a kid my age with a beret on his head and a Dizzy Gillespie-type goatee on the end of his chin. A bebopper, I thought to myself. Oh s—-, not one of them.”
When they quickly realized how united they were by the blues, writes Stoller, “I started playing some blues” on the piano. “Jerry improvised some lyrics and sung them as if he had been born in Mississippi.”
“We shook hands and said, ‘We’ll be partners.’ ”
America and the world were never quite the same.
It’s hard to pick my favorite story from the typhoon of them blowing through “Hound Dog,” one of the indispensable books of 2009 as well as one of the most rollickingly pleasurable.
Is it Jerry Leiber at Elaine’s suddenly attacked from behind and strangled by Norman Mailer, after having decisively whipped a bruising friend of Mailer’s in a wrestling match supervised by Elaine Kaufman herself? Surely there’s inestimable value to American culture in the confirmation of the widespread suspicion that a sneak attack and stranglehold from behind would be a drunken Mailer’s M. O.
Or is it Mike Stoller’s story about how he and Leiber and “avant-garde composer” and longtime University at Buffalo Music Department mainstay Morton Feldman almost wrote the background music to the arty and rather dreadful 1961 Carroll Baker movie “Something Wild.”
Writes Stoller: “I’d written a jazz theme and a big band arrangement. Jerry had written a lyric and we’d put together an orchestra of great musicians, half from the Basie band and half from Ellington’s.”
Never one to leave well enough alone, Feldman, typically, had an idea. “Let me take your arrangement and redistribute it into various small groups. Then you and Jerry and I will each conduct the ensembles at different tempos, all at the same time and in the same studio.”
In typical Leiber/Stoller style, Stoller responded “why not?” to his friend Morty’s lunatic proposal of Ivesian film music in 1961. “The result,” writes Stoller, “was annoying, frightening and wonderfully nauseating. It would have worked phenomenally well in the film.” (Note: the revered and far more conventional Aaron Copland ultimately got the “Something Wild” scoring gig, out of which he later fashioned his superb “Music for a Great City.”)
By this time, Leiber and Stoller had already virtually invented the job of record producer and re-created the sound of American pop music with the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” the “everything but the kitchen sink” record that pointed their onetime acolyte and associate Phil Spector into the innovative direction of his “Wall of Sound.”
It’s mind-boggling to think that Feldman was so close to those whose songbook includes so many hits. (See accompanying story.)
“Today,” writes Stoller, “R&B and rock ‘n’ roll are taken seriously as art forms. When we started writing and producing, a two-line review in Cash Box magazine was the best one could expect for a blues or R&B record. As far as Jerry and I were concerned the song we were writing might have a life span of a few months. They were cute, they were appealing, they were seductive. Singers liked to sing them and fans liked to listen to them.”
Which, except for the unfortunately derogatory connotation of the word “cute,” describes their collaborated autobiography in their mutual 76th year.
Yet another Leiber and Stoller product that may be destined for an entirely unforeseen and insanely long life.
