Word: stoller
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...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...
...Leiber and Stoller weren?t responsible for the Drifters? indenture, they also didn?t bother to force its change. And though the writer-producers? early work had an underdog acerbity, their determination to produce hit after Drifters hit made them cautious with other writers? songs. Mann and Weil had written "Only in America" as a scathing denunciation of civil inequity: "Only in America/ Land of opportunity/ Do they save a seat in the back of the bus just for me." Leiber and Stoller rewrote the lyric as a straightforward, Horatio Alger anthem. The meaning was lost; worse, it was twisted...
...Leiber and Stoller left Atlantic in 1963 to form their own label, Red Bird. As composers, they soon ceased writing hits. But their catalog was so rich that it kept generating them. Dion covered two Drifters songs, "Ruby Baby" from ?956 and "Drip Drop" from ?958. At least five L&S oldies became later Top "0 hits: "I (Who have Nothing)" (Tom Jones), "I?m a Woman" (Maria Muldaur), "On Broadway" (George Benson), "Spanish Harlem" (Aretha Franklin) and "There Goes My Baby" (Donna Summer). In the curio category are a rendition of "Stand by Me" by one Cassius Clay...