RIP Jerry Leiber

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/source-songwriter-jerry-leiber-dies-at-78-20110822

Damn.

One of the few real links to the original R&R world, pre-presley.

Monumental. Would never have guessed he/they produced "Stuck in the Middle with You."

Awww, RIP

Wow--"Jailhouse Rock" and "Loving You" for Elvis Presley; "There Goes My Baby" and "On Broadway" for the Drifters; Ben E. King's solo hits "Spanish Harlem" and "Stand by Me"; "Yakety Yak," "Sear-chin'," "Poison Ivy" and "Charlie Brown" for those great rock & roll clowns the Coasters; seminal R&B ravers like "Kansas City," "Riot in Cell Block No. 9" and "Hound Dog," a hit for both Elvis and, in its original risque rendition, Big Mama Thornton.

Leiber: "Hound Dog" took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. "Kansas City" was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.

Stoller: In the early days we'd go back and forth note for note, syllable for syllable, word for word in the process of creating.

Wow

RIP, a true giant

Incredible discography. RIP

From the LA Times obit:

To write songs for "Jailhouse Rock," Leiber and Stoller flew to New York City, but they were having such a great time going to jazz clubs that the producer, Jean Aberbach, who with his brother Julian published Presley's music, showed up at their hotel and demanded to know where his songs were. Not satisfied with their response, Aberbach shoved a sofa in front of the door, plunked down on it and said: "I'm not leaving until I get my songs."

Five hours and four songs later, Aberbach left and Leiber and Stoller were back out on the town. The songs were "Jailhouse Rock," "Treat Me Nice," "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" and "I Want to be Free."

RIP

nice obit on Dave Marsh's rock and rap confidential e-mail

RIP. "is that all there is?" forever amen

“Big Mama,” Jerry suggested gently, “maybe if you’d attack it with a little more–”

“Come here, boy,” she said, motioning me to stand even closer to her. “I’ll tell you what you can attack. Attack this…” she added, pointing to her crotch.

Johnny Otis came to the rescue, saying “You sing it Jerry, you show Big Mama how it goes

RIP. An original, in every sense of the word.

RIP Jerry, a true great

nice obit on Dave Marsh's rock and rap confidential e-mail

― curmudgeon, Monday, August 22, 2011 8:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

paste that here?

there goes my baby by the drifters is amazing; everything is out of tune and it's magnificent.

i was thinking this morning that i ought to buy that coasters box set.

A bad day in the history of songwriting this. RIP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbjDEs6Hbco

someone find the scene from scorsese's after hours w/ is that all there is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GmwhCyTMAY

On second reading I see that the Rap and Rock Confidential(RRC) obit thing I referenced above is just a quick summary of the book about them, but it contains some information that I had not read elsewhere:

This is from RRC 228:


IT TAKES TWO… Hound Dog ($15, Simon and Schuster), written with David Ritz, is the autobiography of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote not only that “title track” but a string of classics--“There Goes My Baby,” “Young Blood,” “Stand By Me,” “Love Potion Number 9,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Kansas City,” “On Broadway,” “Poison Ivy,” “I (Who Have Nothing), “Framed,” “Spanish Harlem,” “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care.” Their famous declaration that “We don’t write songs, we write records” is literally true—they produced and arranged most of the records, with Leiber creating the scratch vocals as a guide and Stoller on keyboards.

Although they were native New Yorkers who were a key part of the Brill Building scene, they met and began to collaborate in Los Angeles while in high school, This opened up their sensibilities to Pachuco styles and much more. “I liked Belmont High School,” Stoller writes. “Half the kids were Mexicans. Then there were Chinese and Japanese kids, black kids and kids from the South Sea Islands. All the hipsters in New York warned me that LA was really square, but they were wrong.”

Yet Leiber and Stoller themselves were hipsters--jazz snobs, fans of the theater and literature and high art—who could never resolve the tension between that and their bedrock, the blues (a young Stoller once took piano lessons from stride master James P. Johnson). They embraced it all and out of the tension came the wildest variety—the goofy playlets of the Coasters (“Yakety yak! Don’t talk back”) and songs of stunning beauty driven by their orchestral ambitions (Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me,” The Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby”).

Hound Dog, presented as a conversation between Leiber and Stoller, is about more than how those songs were written and recorded. It details their efforts to rise above the constraints of the music business, in the process enduring conflicts with Colonel Parker, Phil Spector, and Atlantic Records. There is plenty of sex and booze and drama (drag racing with James Dean, Stoller ending up in the ocean when the Andrea Doria sinks) and the heart-rending attempts of two flawed men trying to build marriages and families.

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller are keenly aware of their place in history (Stoller again: “We can’t and won’t claim credit as the inventors of rap, but if you listen to our early output, you’ll hear lots of black men talking poem-stories over a heavy backbeat.”). But what comes across more fundamentally is their sense of wonder at all that human beings are able to create, their determination to drink it all in and then, in every way possible, to spit it back out.

Hound Dog is a pretty good book, I started a thread about it but didn't get too many takers. After reading that you should also read the Josh Friedman article about them. Anyway, RIP Jerry.

Thanks.

Found it: New (not Lieber) Leiber And Stoller Bio