Word: leiber
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...small measure of the astonishing gifts of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller that all these songs have already slipped so securely into contemporary tradition that they seem less like the work of writers than the product of a shared musical history. That is as it should be, since Leiber and Stoller always worked best close to the roots. In a sense, they even became part of the roots, a fact richly demonstrated in a new book, Baby, That Was Rock & Roll (Harvest/HBJ; $6.95), that is part song compendium, part photo album, part biographical appreciation, and all long past...
Transplanted Easterners who started collaborating while they were still teenagers in Los Angeles, Leiber and Stoller, who are now both 45, shared an uncanny gift for crossing musical bloodlines. Both loved black rhythm-and-blues music, and could write it with such glancing wit and thorough funk that their songs sounded fresh off the streets. It is worth keeping in mind that at the time of the first major Leiber-Stoller hit, Hound Dog, released by Willie Mae ("Big Mama") Thornton in 1953, pop music had its own kind of enforced segregation. The sudden, seismic synthesis of mainstream...
Presley, the first certifiable rock superstar, built his legend with a fair assist from Leiber and Stoller, who provided him with not only Hound Dog but such other cornerstones as Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, Loving You and Treat Me Nice. And that wasn't even their best...
Working as producers and occasional writers for the Drifters, Leiber and Stoller brought strings to rock, turned out soaring lyric ballads that remain unsurpassed. As writers and producers for the Coasters, the team gave goofy high spirits and tough sidewalk irony to songs that were essentially comic melodramas in miniature. They also provided a musical definition of rock that still works as well as any: "You say that music's for the birds/ And you can't understand the words/ Well, honey, if you did/ You'd really blow your lid/ 'Cause baby, that is rock...
True Jews. Leiber cited as evidence of Pius XII's wartime ministrations to Jews a society called The Good Works of St. Raphael, which supposedly aided thousands of Italian Jews to emigrate to Brazil before the Black Sabbath in October 1943, when the Gestapo entered the Roman ghetto. But Waagenaar quotes the wartime head of the society, Father Anton Weber, as explaining that his group "was concerned only with baptized Jews of non-Italian nationality, not with true Jews...