Word: leiber
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...Smokey Joe?s Cafe" was the first of what Leiber called "radio playlets": menacing narratives in blues settings. "Riot in Cell Block #9" (later speeded up and jollied up for Elvis as "Jailhouse Rock"); "Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots" (about a moto-madman who "hit a screamin? diesel that was California-bound"); and "Framed" (in which the narrator is picked up by cops, fingered by stool pigeon, railroaded by prosecuting attorney). Lumpen tragicomedies, they had an implicit warning for their black listeners: that life was unfair to the underclass. As Leiber says in the "What?d I Say" book...
...point-of-view writing and obscure movie and radio references. Scarface Jones? Bulldog Drummond? Salty Sam and Sweet Sue (in their masterpiece, "Along Came Jones")? Most kids didn?t know that the Shadow was a ?30s radio hero (voiced by Orson Welles), but they couldn?t help laughing at Leiber?s threatening rhymes: "You?d better mind your P?s and Q?s/ And your M?s and N?s and O?s / Because... the Shadow knows...
...Leiber?s parodies - "aural cartoons," Donald Clarke calls them - were also social criticism; they sounded black but could apply to alienated whites too. Stoller?s uptempo bluesy charts (usually 12-bar blues) found the ideal blend of honking sax solos by King Curtis and the singers, who had distinct comic personality: Gardner?s lead tenor in a vaudeville vibrato of fear and trembling, Bobby Guy?s smart-guy growl (a nastier version of the Ray Charles tout-voice), Dub Jones? mindshaft bass delivering the cool catchphrases (as parent: "You better leave my daughter alone" and "Don?t talk back...
...Then Leiber and Stoller turned around and masterminded the lushest, most romantic and musically inventive genre rock had yet heard: the Drifters? song book. Their first effort, the King composition "There Goes My Baby," is still one of pop?s weirdest records: a standard doo-wop lament that has four violins and a cello sawing away (a jarring innovation back then) and, like a distant war drum, a timpani that no one knew how to tune and so hits one note no matter what the chord change. When Wexler first heard this bizarre melange, he was more than disappointed...
...write songs," Leiber and Stoller have often said. "We write records." Over the next five years, while managing an ever-drifting roster of Drifters personnel, Leiber and Stoller made gorgeous records. They got three particularly inventive pieces from Pomus and his new writing partner Mort Shuman: "This Magic Moment," "Save the Last Dance for Me" and the can-never-be-played-too-often "Sweets for My Sweet." L&S also encouraged the young songwriters in Broadway?s Brill Building - Gerry Goffin and Carole King ("When My Little Girl Is Smiling"), Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil ("On Broadway"), who were...