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.
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Leiber - Elvis - Stoller:
Hound Dog |
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 long-time
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.
Hound Dog Lyrics
|
Who Discovered Elvis |
Sam Phillips |
Elvis Music
| Chips Moman
