Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las 9781501331749, 9781501331770, 9781501331763

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
Sophisticated Boom Boom
Out in the Streets
What Is Love?
At the Moment, It Doesn’t Look Good
Shangri-La, or Tomorrow’s a Long Way Off
Does This Sound Familiar?
Notes
Introduction
Sophisticated Boom Boom
Out in the Streets
What Is Love?
At the Moment, It Doesn’t Look Good
Shangri-La, or Tomorrow’s a Long Way Off
Does This Sound Familiar?
Also available in the series

Citation preview

GOLDEN HITS OF THE SHANGRI-LAS Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration —The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough —Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “3313” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury. com/musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Hamilton by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti Timeless by Martin Deykers Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner Blue Lines by Ian Bourland Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler xx by Jane Morgan Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick Boy in Da Corner by Sandra Song Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal and many more…

Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las

Ada Wolin

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Ada Wolin, 2019 Cover design: 333sound.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-50133-174-9 ePDF: 978-1-50133-176-3 eBook: 978-1-50133-175-6 1

Series: 33 3

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

Introduction 1 Sophisticated Boom Boom 9 Out in the Streets 27 What Is Love? 43 At the Moment, It Doesn’t Look Good 57 Shangri-La, or Tomorrow’s a Long Way Off 69 Does This Sound Familiar? 91 Notes Work Cited

111 119

vi

Introduction

In a 1964 episode of the television game show I’ve Got a Secret, the Shangri-Las perform “Leader of the Pack,” the gateway drug to their melodramatic high. It’s pure early 1960s TV magic: dubious lip-synching, coordinated outfits and movements, an ecstatic live audience shrieking at all the right moments. As “Betty,” the clear leader of the group, recounts her doomed romance with her biker boyfriend “Jimmy,” she is coaxed along by probing questions from her two seemingly identical friends. In the spirit of Grease’s iconic “tell me more, tell me more,” they relate the story through tropes found nearly everywhere in 1960s girl-group music: chatty phone conversations and call and response singing, teen girls parodying their own stereotypes. During the minutes before the Shangri-Las’s performance of “Leader of the Pack” on I’ve Got a Secret, celebrity panelists Robert Goulet and Betsy Palmer pantomime the lyrics of the song as a soap-opera scene. It plays well as comic melodrama, with Palmer sobbing out the story of “Jimmy,” and Goulet, remarkably straight-faced, reciting back-up lyrics in the form of stoic reassurances. But then in a surprise twist, the host brings out the real actors, the Shangri-Las, who launch

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

into their own one-act tragedy. Goulet returns, this time as the corporeal form of Jimmy, leather-clad from head to toe and perched stiffly on a motorcycle, and though he is easily twice the girls’ age, he exudes a brand of eroticism worthy of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, mugging for the camera, punctuating the music with the rev of his engine and smirking at the audience. The girls are clad in vaguely schoolgirlish ensembles of white blouses and knee-grazing black skirts, a far cry from the sophisticated cocktail dresses of their musical peers. The scene is set; it is 1964 and three teenagers from Queens have the number one hit in the nation. The girl-group era is a daunting knot to untangle—aside from the Supremes, and to a lesser extent, the Ronettes (notorious for their ties with Phil Spector) no other individual group of this era has been seriously considered as a stand-alone act. To talk about just one group is a novel endeavor, as the discourse has centered, by and large, around the general phenomenon. Girl-groups, as we blandly label them, have come to seem a quaintly vintage entity, like 1970s harvest-gold kitchen appliances, warm, familiar, but largely unexamined. Memorialized forever on the oldies station, frozen in their fifteen minutes of young fame. The wave of these groups that surfaced in the early 1960s was impeccably curated. Their songs were written and produced for them—few of the singers played instruments or wrote their own lyrics. Their sound came from hitmakers who worked like machines, banging out surefire palate pleasers that were, at worst, obligingly formulaic. At their best, songs like the Ronette’s “Be My Baby,” (written by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, and Phil Spector) and The 2

I N T R O D U C T IO N

Shirelles’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” (Gerry Goffin and Carole King,) created a lasting impact, almost cruel in their ability to be both catchy and heart-wrenching. In all of this highly calculated poetry, though, we lose sight of an important part of the music, the girls themselves, too often painted as faceless, interchangeable performers who could be swapped in and out at a moment’s notice. The Shangri-Las emerge from the canon of girl-groups as the one genuine stand out act. They are most remembered for their contribution of “death discs,” morbid songs of teenage angst and untimely ends. In Golden Hits of the ShangriLas, the most definitive distillation of their brief tenure as a group, I tally three such tragic songs and, additionally, four more of lost love. Hearts are broken and the body count is surprisingly high for a group of sixteen-year olds; as attested to by their I Have a Secret performance, drama was their game. If you haven’t heard of the Shangri-Las, it may be because of this very shtick, morbid, and melodramatic, which some say limited the group’s appeal. Was there anywhere to go but down from this emotional high? The Shangri-Las were all but retired by 1968, going out, not with a whimper, but with a bang, leaving us to wonder, if things had turned out differently, would the group have ever proven their ability to stray from melodrama and dig deeper than shock value? I will argue, as you may have guessed by now, that they already had. Critics and listeners alike have tended to dismiss any girlgroup not produced by the famed Phil Spector. But before we hastily dismiss the Shangri-Las, we should first consider that maybe their failure to measure up groups like the Ronettes 3

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

or the Shirelles hinges more upon the ways in which they deliberately struck out against the girl-group norm, than it does on their attempts to imitate it. The group looked different—decidedly contrary to the classed-up standards of most of the smiling, ladylike women you saw singing on TV in 1965. The Shangri-Las’s lead singer, Mary Weiss, did not smile politely but instead pouted or grinned impishly. The girls were rarely seen in dresses, more often caught in pants and high boots, black turtlenecks, leather jumpsuits, and fishnet sleeves. A look that didn’t try to hide, and in fact, often played up their working-class background. Their tendency to sing about bad-boys was not in itself remarkable; however the fact that they themselves looked tough was. Mary Weiss’s moral indifference toward her boyfriend in “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” allows her to grant that he is “good bad,” but “not evil.” Rebellion was not just fetishized from an outside perspective. It was bridged, and embodied by the girls themselves. They were actually cool. Despite the pop format they worked within, the ShangriLas were proto-punk in their sensibilities, embodying a punk aesthetic which still reverberates in rock today. “Good Bad Not Evil,” the 2006 album by neo-garage band The Black Lips, is only one reference to the Shangri-Las as part of the unofficial legacy of the group. When New York Dolls frontman David Johansen spits “When I say I’m in love, you best believe I’m in love, L-U-V,” in “Looking for a Kiss,” copping the spoken intro of the Shangri-Las’s 1965 hit “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” it’s more than parody, it’s actually love. This love and respect would be paid by many rock bands still to come—but, arguably, the New York Dolls 4

I N T R O D U C T IO N

(whose album almost ten years later would be produced by Shangri-Las’ songwriter George “Shadow” Morton), clad in teased hair and platforms, answered the call first. They are after all, just bad boys from New York, promoting the mythos of the “tough guy” in a manner uncannily similar to the way that ubiquitous character appeared in the songs of the Shangri-Las. The resemblance is so uncanny, in fact, that the Shangri-Las’ fixation on “the leader of the pack” seems almost prescient, as though predicting the arrival of the punk rock ethos. While the homage is certainly clear enough in their 1985 album Psychocandy, indie icons the Jesus and Mary Chain also directly acknowledged their debt to the ShangriLas. “I am sure you guys were and maybe still are into Phil Spector girl groups. Did you hear about those bands via the Ramones?”1 asked Mogwai guitarist Stuart Braithwaite in a recent interview with guitarist Jim Reid. “The Shangri Las were my favourite of those girl bands,” answers Reid. “I remember “Leader of the Pack” was in a Levi’s ad in 1975 and that was the first time I ever heard the song. As a result, I dug up some more stuff of theirs. There’s just something magical about that kind of music that stuck with us.” How did the offbeat legacy of the Shangri-Las get swept under the rug, despite being a cult favorite and constant reference for many punk and indie bands? A term that I find infinitely useful in talking about girl-groups is homosociality, the preference for social bonds between members of the same sex. It’s the “boys’ club” mentality that rock ’n’ roll has traditionally had in spades, but is also, if less frequently discussed, a defining feature of the kinship between girl5

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

groups and their teen-girl fan bases, a demographic that has been historically patronized and seldom taken seriously. Does the teen-girl appeal of the group in some way disqualify them from serious consideration? The Shangri-Las, all legal minors for a good part of their career, were singing for the validation of this teenage culture. In the mid-1960s, “teenager” was still relatively new as a popular term. Youth culture would never be the same—angst had established a foothold which it’s never relinquished. The Shangri-Las validated the strife of being a teenager, but they also offered a fantasy world, especially important for teen girls who had little waiting for them outside of their inevitable inauguration into the nuclear family as wife and then mother. Youthful love, dazzling and short-lived as it is in these songs, was something that young girls could have for their own. This kind of unsanctioned love had an expiration date, in the hyperbolic case of the Shangri-Las’s dramas, premature death. Outside of this realm of fantasy came the story unsung, the inescapable stuff of reality—marriage, family—quite separate from the unbridled rebellion of young feverish romance. In its legacy, girl-group music itself remains homosocialized, its validation by critics as a cultural influence legitimized only within the context of women in music. Is it overly simplistic to attribute its lack of validation to some embarrassment, some unwillingness to critically approach pop music presented by young girls? Does it, in fact, take a teenage girl, or an overly ironic sensibility, to appreciate the music of the Shangri-Las? The preponderance of musicians that cite the group as a major influence seems to counter 6

I N T R O D U C T IO N

this kind of dismissive or limited response to their work, suggesting instead that their appeal is not so narrow that it should be confined to a specific era and demographic. But even I find myself providing evidence of their recognition by male musicians instead of validating a group that can stand on its own. The resonance of teenage disenfranchisement, after all, fascinates regardless of era or age. It is a theme in a constant state of reinvention; consider the Grunge bands of 1980s Seattle, an angst more ponderous and nihilistic, perhaps, but nevertheless one responding to similar uncertainties about adulthood. Adolescence is a time of “liminality,” or inbetweenness, a twilight zone between childhood and adulthood that is rife with personal conflicts and doubts about one’s place in the world. It is an uncanny time that can never be revisited, not exactly, not in any literal sense. However, it can be approximated by experiencing the teenage pathos of the Shangri-Las’s songs where adolescence is a never-ending utopic fantasy, much like the“Shangri-La” with which the group shares a name. Though we may no longer be held in suspended adolescence, we can journey again through this transitional rite of passage. And so, when Mary Weiss sings the question, “Does this sound familiar?” in “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” we call back, “Yeah. Yeah, it does.”

7

8

Sophisticated Boom Boom

You can’t begin to talk about the Shangri-Las without talking about girl-groups, the genre they belong to as well as the mold they broke out of. The problem is that the term “girlgroup” is surprisingly contested. In the sparse amount of critical writing about the genre, writers use different criteria; though the label conjures the image of young girls, some say that age is not necessarily a defining factor of the girlgroup. Others still suggest expanding the label to include solo female singers making music during the same period of time. Though many of these arguments are compelling, for the sake of clarity I will try to be consistent in my own definition of girl-groups. For my purposes, girl-group music refers to the style of girl-fronted pop that became hugely popular in the early to mid-1960s, generally recognizable by the use of doo-wop inspired call and response singing and instrumentation that straddles the divides of bubblegum pop and early rock ’n’ roll. But I recognize that in general, the term “girl-group” is a pretty large umbrella. A good example of the genre’s many permutations, the recent box set released by Rhino called Girl Group Sounds: One Kiss Can Lead to Another includes not only obscure girl-group songs but also

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

songs further outside the typical girl-group sound, such as Wanda Jackson’s “The Funnel of Love,” Carole King’s “He’s a Bad Boy” and even some Dolly Parton. The term “girl-group” is inherently ambiguous, and Rhino (not unfairly) uses it to present a general roundup of female singers of the 1960s. Incidentally, the collection includes two of the more obscure Shangri-Las songs, “Train from Kansas City” and “Out in the Street,” which might not make it onto a more conservative girl-group compilation. It’s a strong collection that introduced me to a number of songs that I now listen to in pretty heavy rotation. I wonder, though, how useful it is to expand the category of girl-group to include any female-fronted music made in the 1960s. One exclusion I see as justifiable, for example, is Dusty Springfield, who belonged to an entirely different milieu, both geographically and sonically speaking. Even for American groups coming out of Motown and the Brill Building, I would argue that the umbrella label of girlgroup is already too big. The vagueness of the girl-group label encompasses too much; to process it all, we have to start to generalize and homogenize. I’m skeptical about the way music that is sonically and aesthetically unrelated has so often been blanketed by the “girl-group” category just because it was performed by women. This is why I center my definition of girl-groups fairly strictly on a sound, a time, and a place. I want to emphasize that “girl” music is not a genre. When I say girl-group, I am talking almost exclusively about groups from two central locations: Detroit and its defining hit factory, Motown Records, which produced the likes of the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas and New 10

S O P H I ST IC AT E D B O OM B O OM

York where the Brill Building served as Motown’s counterpart and competitor, launching groups like the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las. The history of Motown and the Brill Building is a fascinating and colorful one, and required reading for any serious rock ’n’ roll lover. But the story of the female performers associated with Motown and the Brill Building often goes untold, or otherwise ill-treated by male-centric “rockist” music writing. For a basic history, Alan Betrock’s survey of girl-groups1 is perhaps the perfect place to start; Betrock not only lays out the timeline and the main groups that define the sound but also dishes out with authority the behind-the-scenes drama, essential in a history so fraught with stories of exploitation and destructive industry politics. But to my mind, the groups really begin to stand apart when you hear the music for yourself. Both Arlene Smith (lead singer of the Chantels, a late 1950s’ group that fused doo-wop with early strains of the girl-group sound) and Ronnie Spector (a later emblem of the girl-group at its peak) admit to being inspired by the tenor vocals of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ 1956 hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.”2 Yet once you’ve heard the Chantels’s “Maybe” and the Ronettes’s “Be My Baby” it’s impossible to say that their common inspirations led to anything like an identical sound. Thanks to footage now available online, you can watch the music video for the Exciters’s hit song “Tell Him” in which lead singer Brenda Reid prowls boldly around a zoo, exuding a sexy brand of self-command. Compare this swagger with Diana Ross’s, ladylike, waifish demeanor, and you can begin to see the variations existing within the girlgroup milieu, both musical and performative. 11

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

The girl-group phenomenon linked groups with obvious stylistic similarities, but it did not confine female performance as strictly as many think. Within the genre there are surprisingly diverse attitudes toward femininity, exhibited most surprisingly in various attitudes toward the subjects of sex and marriage. Not all songs represented the wholesome marriage-oriented message of “Chapel of Love” by the Dixie Cups, or Darlene Love’s “Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Marry.” Within the love songs of the girl-group era, there was also the beginning of an oblique conversation around the question of sex: wanting it, fearing it, wondering about the outcome. Songs such as the Ronettes’s “Be My Baby” lean toward the sex-positive end of things while the Shirelles’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” tends toward a more uncertain view of sexual independence. When most people think of the image of girl-groups, they probably conjure up the gowned persona typified by the women of Motown, who were styled by the label’s team of experts (what was virtually a “charm school” for their female artists) with an across-the-board ladylike affect that emphasized poise and glamour. The pressures for black performers were different than those felt by a white group like the Shangri-Las—for Motown, any sense of rebellion had to be tame enough to remain palatable to a white audience. The Shangri-Las, on the other hand, could push the envelope and still remain marketable, as (to a lesser extent) could a group like the Ronettes, who were styled a bit more provocatively than most girl-groups. After some hesitation, I’ve come to realize that we must talk about image when we talk about girl-groups, something 12

S O P H I ST IC AT E D B O OM B O OM

I’ve had to grapple with from the start of this project. I have in some way internalized the tacit rule that for girl-group music to be taken seriously, critics must separate the music from its “girlness.” In the scanty and cursory praise that does exist of girl-group music, I’ve been troubled by the way this music has been considered apart from its performers, as if the music has to be disembodied to seem a worthwhile subject. Troubling too is the fact that praise of girl-group music centers almost exclusively on the “genius” of the production, the exquisiteness of the songwriting and instrumentation. It’s as if the performers and singers themselves were somehow incidental to the largely male-dominated production that created the hits around them. This consideration leaves out a hugely important component of the music: the women whose voices and presence defined those hits as surely as the songs and the studios behind them. To focus, then, only on the music and neglect the way these artists presented themselves and the songs is to miss an essential aspect of the appeal and definition of what is already a phenomenon that has been unfairly neglected. Rock ’n’ roll has historically been just as image-driven as the fashion industry—David Bowie’s recent death, and before that, the art retrospective David Bowie Is, prompted many people to revisit the concept of the performer-as-artist, which Bowie helped legitimize. The many hats Bowie wore throughout his career were not only ephemeral and musical but also literal. Much of his innovation was character-driven and fashion-centered; Bowie was an innovator not only in terms of music but also in terms of style and performance. Even the most “untutored” moments of rock included 13

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

posturing as well; the ongoing presence today of Ramones logos, Hot Topic dog collars and Black Flag tattoos all attest to the enduring power of image in countercultural movements. Whether you want to admit it or not, image and presentation are significant components of musical performance. It’s not surprising to feel pressure—internal or external—to leave out image in a discussion of women-fronted music, but cutting out performance and image from a discussion of girl-groups would yet again serve to cut the girls out of girl-group music. Brenda Reid, Ronnie Spector, the Shangri-Las’s own Mary Weiss—these women were unique performers and singers. Their singularity comes not only through in their recordings but also through their filmed TV performances which, thanks to the internet, we have access to today. The Beatles performing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the Ed Sullivan Show still stands as a thrilling piece of theater; shots alternate between the fab four in their matching suits and their screaming fans. In 1956 footage (also from the Ed Sullivan Show) Elvis Presley performs “Hound Dog,” barely attempting to strum his guitar, focusing his energy instead on scanning the audience, alternately snarling and smirking, punctuating the song’s chorus with leg shaking and pelvic thrusting. In a performance almost nine years later, we see a similar audience of screaming girls, but this time they’re screaming for the Shangri-Las, four teenage girls wearing futuristic jumpsuits with fishnet sleeves, shaking their hips badly out of sync with their music. It’s illuminating to see that the brashness that manifests in their music is in fact real. How could it not be? Who could coach someone to be this all-over-the-place? Just as Elvis’s sex-and-cool appeal 14

S O P H I ST IC AT E D B O OM B O OM

is tied to his musical appeal, just as the Beatles’s infamous shift away from their leather-jacketed rocker look to sharp matching suits set them apart, so too the Shangri-Las are tied to their image and performance which enhances an understanding of their outlier status. I suspect that more than anything, the fear of talking about image in the context of girl-groups relates back to the doubts that many people have about the authenticity of the music. Weren’t these girls coached through everything? Weren’t they exploited by their producers? Isn’t the music a little phony? Questions like these are hardly surprising, considering the Rockist standard that prizes above all else the musical auteur, a genius who writes, performs and produces often his—seldom her— own material. I attribute part of the cynicism that surrounds our modern view of girl-group music to the hierarchy that we impose on music production, which puts at the very bottom of the totem pole those artists who do not write songs or play instruments. In her book Girl Groups, Girl Culture, Jacqueline Warwick points to the continual disparagement of singers as an important factor, a dismissal that has particularly warped the recognition of girl-groups. Performance and singing are seen as nonessential (easy) roles, while musicians and songwriters, not to mention the “genius” producers, do all the heavy lifting.3 Warwick rightfully points out the hypocrisy of the enduring regard for Elvis Presley, “who likewise wrote none of his songs but is generally considered the author of his music.”4 Elvis’s well-known song “Hound Dog” was originally written for Big Mama Thornton by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a prominent songwriting duo 15

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

of the girl-group era. One could argue that Elvis pioneered a sound and an attitude, and in this we find his originality. That we can grant Elvis a central part in his own persona as an artist—a view that is undeniably right—makes it even clearer that such reverence for the role of singer and trendsetter is rarely extended to female singers, at least by “serious” music critics. One argument is of the essence, and it’s probably best to just get it out of the way and move on; it’s easy to let the retro-novelty of 1960s’ pop distract us from the fact that rock fans, generally, like to look down on pop music of the current era. The argument of Poptimism versus Rockism, while not a new issue, has been recently transcribed online in a volley of opinion pieces that attempt to analyze it from every angle possible. To boil it down, I’ll start with Saul Austerlitz’s contemptuous words in his The New York Times treatise, “The Pernicious Rise of Poptimism.” The reigning style of music criticism today is called “poptimism,” or “popism,” and it comes complete with a series of trap doors through which the unsuspecting skeptic may tumble. Prefer Queens of the Stone Age to Rihanna? Perhaps you are a “rockist,” still salivating over your old Led Zeppelin records and insisting that no musical performer not equipped with a serious case of self-seriousness and, probably, a guitar, bass and drums is worthy of consideration. Find Lady Gaga’s bargain basement David Bowie routine a snooze? You, my friend, are fatally out of touch with the mainstream, with the pop idols of the present.5

16

S O P H I ST IC AT E D B O OM B O OM

From the perspective of the anti-poptimist, poptimism is a blind adherence to the mainstream, a pseudo-populistic, overeager defense of the music that was excluded from the world of music criticism for so long. From Austerlitz’s perspective, poptimism is marked by an almost authoritarian insistence on the validity of pop, as well as a similar insistence on the closed-mindedness of anyone who doesn’t partake. Music scholar Ted Gioia agrees in his 2014 article, “Music Criticism Has Devolved into Lifestyle Reporting,”6 which further implicates music critics in this slavish devotion to pop, which prioritizes fashion and celebrity over the actual music. According to Gioia, music critics are no longer qualified to write about music: they lack the chops, the theory, knowledge and background. They are wrapped up in identity politics, and too beholden to trends and marketing ploys. Both Austerlitz and Gioia smugly own up to the poptimist charge of “rockism” with a so-sue-me shrug. “What’s wrong with taking music seriously?,” they say complacently. Gioia and Austerlitz’s arguments are ultimately plagued by the tasteless way that the debate of pop versus rock is subbed out for something that resembles, as Kelefa Sanneh puts it, a competition that pits “straight white men against the rest of the world.”7 Both writers do so in almost all of their examples; in the earlier quote from Austerlitz, he pits Queen of the Stone Age against Rihanna and, later, Lady Gaga versus David Bowie. Later still it’s Speedy Ortiz versus Sky Ferreira, Miley Cyrus and Haim. Gioia too turns his critique into one that particularly ridicules female pop stars. “I’ve just spent a very depressing afternoon looking through the leading music periodicals,” he writes, “and what did I 17

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

learn? Pretty much what I expected. I found out what the chart-topping musicians are wearing (or, in many instances, not wearing).”8 He too lampoons Miley Cyrus as well as Katy Perry. Gioia is not specifically a rockist; he praises highly the niche communities of jazz and world music writing. His standard for music criticism, however, is still highly elitist— to slow the current backslide into amateurism, it would be better if we were led by experts, theory aficionados with impeccable taste. While some of Gioia’s claims are certainly well founded (we are certainly inundated with a tremendous amount of music writing, often of little depth), his ideal model of music criticism would remain a boy’s club, as evidenced by his article’s failure to name one female critic or female artist whom he considers truly “serious.” As Kelefa Sanneh writes in his 2004 article “The Rap Against Rockism,” Countless critics assail pop stars for not being rock ’n’ roll enough, without stopping to wonder why that should be everybody’s goal. Or they reward them disproportionately for making rock ’n’ roll gestures. Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times this summer, Jim DeRogatis grudgingly praised Ms. Lavigne as “a teen-pop phenom that discerning adult rock fans can actually admire without feeling (too) guilty,” partly because Ms. Lavigne “plays a passable rhythm guitar” and “has a hand in writing” her songs.9 By somewhat adhering to a rockist standard of merit—she can play guitar and contributes to the songwriting process— Avril Lavigne passes the test. That her take on punk is just prepackaged pop with a bit of an attitude might seem anathema 18

S O P H I ST IC AT E D B O OM B O OM

to a rock critic. As Sanneh suggests, it’s as if rock critics are so relieved to hear guitars that they will praise even the most artificial music on the market as long as it contains some six-string strumming. For Austerlitz, seriousness involves “self seriousness” and “a guitar, bass and drums.”10 That’s not to say that pop stars do not include such instruments, but rather that they do not, themselves, necessarily play them. Serious music is also apparently antiestablishment, against the mainstream. As Austerlitz writes, critiquing what he sees as a closed loop in which mainstream artists receive all of the attention, “criticism is supposed to challenge readers on occasion, not only provide seals of approval.”11 Austerlitz, meanwhile, somewhat unconvincingly demonstrates his outré  musical tastes with a mention of Led Zeppelin, his appreciation of “the Strokes” later albums’ and his opinion that “the National are geniuses.”12 In contrast, Sanneh cites the infamous 1979 “disco demolition” at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, during which a crate of disco records was exploded on the field as part of a baseball promotion. This stunt has come to symbolize for some the homophobia and racism that often accompanied anti-disco attitudes. Rockism like this is often implicitly violent, and ironically for a group so avidly in favor of being “all about the music,” rails less against how pop music sounds, than who pop music represents. The thinly veiled misogyny of both Austerlitz’ and Gioia’s critiques of poptimism, the fact that they reference only female pop stars, suggests that they put a female face to poptimism and its accompanying lack of rigor. So too does their dismissal of pop carry a whiff of classism, as though music writing should belong solely to the 19

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

critics in their high towers who can guide us safely toward the rock canon. If Austerlitz’s well-placed markers of taste are any indication of what that might look like, the canon most likely involves white men and guitars. While I don’t really want to give this debate much more of our time, it’s certainly relevant in the context of re-evaluating a group like the Shangri-Las. As I mentioned before, it’s too easy to let nostalgia distract us from the fact that the ShangriLas are still a pop group and still belong to a derided and marginalized group according to the rockist faction of music criticism. I believe that the rock world is ready to talk indepth about girl-groups, but I warn the reader that it’s often too easy to separate the Shangri-Las from the label of girlgroup, letting their outlier status protect them from some of our biases against the genre. In a sense, we can slip too easily into the rhetoric of “they’re not like normal girls, they’re cool girls,” thus praising them while putting down the genre at large. Sanneh puts it well: “There’s a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for doo-wop groups and folk singers and disco queens and even rappers—just so long as they, y’know, rock.”13 This is our challenge while approaching the ShangriLas—we must consider them as different, innovative, but remain wary of pitting them against their own genre or defining them against some of its essential qualities in order to praise them. The Shangri-Las are a girl-group, so let’s talk about girl-groups. Girl-groups of the mid-1960s represent an interesting case study in the politics of ownership, largely because the Brill Building and Motown have come to represent a mode of song-production that was virtually eradicated by the British 20

S O P H I ST IC AT E D B O OM B O OM

invasion. The Brill Building was a song factory. Songwriters, composers, publishers and producers were all housed in a few Manhattan buildings with the express mandate to make hits. Mike Stoller remembers the way that songwriters pitched songs to their higher-ups: Frequently in the Brill Building writers would go, as they used to say, to peddle their songs. Usually they tried to get to the piano, sometimes they would sing acapella, sometimes they had a ukulele, sometimes they’d pull out a clarinet and play a tune and say, “Would you like this one?” And they’d go door-to-door. They’d start at the top because it’s easier to walk down than to walk up.14 That’s where Carole King got her start as a songwriter, most notably with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” which she cowrote with Barry Goffin when she was just eighteen. The system included a lot of moving parts, but it also gave many young and talented songwriters the opportunity to put their creative work out there. “We were just so happy to be making records,” remembers songwriter Ellie Greenwich, “and to be able to get paid the amount of money, whatever it was, to do something that you loved.”15 Listening to the songwriters wax nostalgic about their Brill Building days, it’s harder to buy into the cynicism I referred to earlier, which depicts the milieu as exploitative and commercially minded. In these interviews, the songwriters put very little emphasis on money. That might be because of Leiber and Stoller, King and Goffin, Greenwich and Barry— they were ultimately just another part of the collaboration. In a way, their contributions have also been lost in the 21

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

narrative; just as girl-group singers have been amalgamated into obscurity, so have the actual songs that they sang. To someone even slightly interested in girl-groups, “Be My Baby” conjures an immediate association with Phil Spector, and by extension, Ronnie Spector, but the 1963 hit probably wouldn’t call to mind songwriters Greenwich and Barry. The other day I saw a clickbait article called “17 Popular Songs You Never Knew Were Written by Carole King,”16—Rolling Stone has a similar one on their website. As it turns out, articles like this are less hyperbolic than they seem: I was truly surprised by the depth of King’s musical contribution. But Carole King was one of the lucky ones—she had a successful solo career, and a 2013 musical to regenerate interest in her. Most of the other songwriters faded into obscurity. When it comes to girl-groups, I just don’t buy into the Svengali story, which paints the singers as puppets manipulated by the industry. It’s pointless to say that the singers were nothing without the music or the production, because you can turn right around again and say at the same time that the music wouldn’t have been what it was without the singers. Why isn’t this fact alone enough for us to consider them as central contributors to the music? By only highlighting their ill-treatment by producers, rather than their invaluable part in the creation of a sound, we ourselves fall into the trap of thinking that singers and performers are indeed secondary, superfluous. Girl-group music reached a new developing audience, the teenage girl. Just as Frankie Lymon was the catalyst for many would-be girl-group singers, the voice that made it all seem possible, so too could the ordinary girl who listened to the hits 22

S O P H I ST IC AT E D B O OM B O OM

sung by a subsequent generation of girl-groups be inspired, temporarily removed from her humdrum life. This music could serve as a confidant, make a young girl feel for once that her thoughts and feelings were important. If you doubt the authenticity of Shirley Owens’s rendition of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” remember that the song was written by a young couple; Gerry Goffin and Carole King had just recently gotten married after King became accidentally pregnant in 1959.17 King was actually a year younger than Owens. It’s an amazing fact that we often lose sight of: this music was almost solely produced by people under thirty. Even Phil Spector was in his early twenties when he became a superstar producer. None of this is to say that the system was wholly kind to its stars. Some of the more sordid parts of girl-group history tell of the threat of replaceability that loomed over the singers’ heads. Most of the groups did not own the rights to their names. The Shangri-Las, though they enjoyed a fairly stable line-up throughout their short career, discovered this in the 1980s, when an impostor group began performing under their name—an endeavor that, while reprehensible, was not actually illegal. For many other groups, Phil Spector owned those names. Ever the micro-manager, he used this leverage to his advantage, switching out groups under the same name, all for the sake of perfecting his vision of the song. A singer might hear her group’s song on the radio, only to find that Spector had substituted Darlene Love’s vocals for hers at the last minute. If a producer didn’t find a singer’s vocals exactly right for a song, he might, with little or no warning to the groups themselves, bring in a new vocalist to sing lead.18 Instances of loyalty toward singers are hard to find. 23

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

It’s too reductive, though, to sum these singers’ experiences up as wholly negative. Warwick suggests that there is something in the fleeting fame that girl-group singers experienced that is not insubstantial, that “dancing for television cameras is perhaps not so very different, in girls’ experience, from dancing in front of the mirror.”19 Thus fame could be fantasy fulfillment, self-affirming in a way that was not necessarily beholden to the male gaze. The girl could gaze upon herself, providing her own affirmation and empowerment. It’s important to understand where a lot of these girls came from, and where they were headed. The Supremes, representing a demographic not atypical of Motown groups, were from a housing project in Detroit.20 The Chantels met at a catholic school in the Bronx, singing choral music.21 Mary Weiss remembers her childhood as miserable, her relationship with her mother strained. Many groups, at least in their first iterations, formed straight out of high school. Arlene Smith of the Chantels remembers, in one nostalgia drenched interview, “Sitting on the bus, looking out of the window and thinking about what I had to do tomorrow was absolute bliss, because I would be in another city, and that evening I would be doing something that I absolutely loved to do: Dressing up and getting onstage and singing.”22 From Smith’s perspective, life as a performer was unlike anything else in her life so far. Many singers eventually faded into obscurity after a few hits, returning to life as usual. But for a few brilliant years, they had something to lift them out of the ordinary.

24

S O P H I ST IC AT E D B O OM B O OM

Of course, though, for all the rose-tinted remembrances we can find, there are as many that tell a different truth, one marked by frustrated ambition and exploited talent. Though Mary Weiss loved being in the studio, she didn’t care much for performing. As she remembers of her days behind the microphone, “My mother kind of signed my life away when I was 14.” “I’m laughing,” she continues. “Thirty years of litigation. There’s a storeroom of litigation up to the ceiling. . . . That’s one of the reasons I walked away. The litigation was much thicker than the music. I couldn’t go near another record label for ten years.”23 Weiss’s musical comeback, in fact, didn’t occur until much later, with her 2007 album Dangerous Game. By chance of simple chronology, the Shangri-Las are often cited as the harbingers of the end of the girl-group era, and so it’s perhaps fitting that they were the most rock ’n’ roll girlgroup of them all and the farthest from the traditional doowop sound that typified early girl-groups like the Chantels. But the Shangri-Las also represent the strangest strain, the farthest reach, of the girl-group sound. They weren’t necessarily the most talented vocalists, but they were certainly the most bizarre and by far the most theatrical. Their death discs are the death rattle of the girl-group sound, and this is why they stand apart as such a deeply misunderstood group. They are transitional, one foot in the “sound” and one foot in the outer reaches of dirty, rebellious rock ’n’ roll.

25

26

Out in the Streets

The Shangri-Las’s biography mostly resembles that of other 1960s’ girl-groups in that we know so little about it. Like most girl-groups, they didn’t get big enough or last long enough to draw avid biographers working to discover something new about their childhoods or their post-stardom years. The Shangri-Las’s career is so rife with tall tales that it’s difficult to distinguish myth-making from the truth. We do know that the group’s personnel were unusually self-contained: the Shangri-Las consisted of two pairs of sisters, Mary and Betty Weiss and Marge and Mary Ann Ganser. Mary and Betty are the only surviving members—Marge Ganser died of breast cancer in 1996, and Mary Ann died at the age of twenty-two, either of a seizure or a barbiturate overdose. The group’s lineup varied throughout their career, with Mary being the only constant member, and Betty and the Ganser twins handling most of the backing vocals in various combinations. While the group’s membership remained relatively constant, it’s vexing to think of how little we know about the intricacies of the line-up. Though Mary clearly sings lead on nearly all of the songs on Golden Hits, I cannot be sure who is

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

singing lead on “What Is Love.” In the many times I’ve listened to it, I can hear Mary in some of the spoken asides but am unable to reconcile the lead vocal melody with her signature sound, a notable for its brassy tonality and significant vibrato. So, who is it? It could be Betty Weiss, and this would be my guess, comparing the vocals with some of the other songs Betty sang lead on such as “Wishing Well” and some versions of “Maybe” and “Shout.” Though Betty did not tour with the group very often, she was, by some accounts, originally slated to be the lead singer, and sang backing vocals on many of the songs on Golden Hits. It’s certainly not Mary Ann whose vocals on “I’m Blue” identify her as the deeper, soulful voice that sometimes emerges from the backing vocals. But regardless of my educated guess about who is singing lead on “What Is Love,” it’s impossible to know for sure. Most people don’t really notice the difference and as a result misattribute the lead vocals to Mary. This kind of confusion is, again, typical for pop groups of the time, as they often featured a rotating cast of lead singers. As in the famous case of the Drifters (the male doo-wop group who sang “Under the Boardwalk” and “On Broadway”), one main singer, Clyde McPhatter, came to represent the group’s sound even though he was only with the Drifters for one year. Similarly, Mary Weiss has come to stand for the Shangri-Las as a whole. Making Mary the focal point of the group may have been intentional. Her domination of the main vocal parts on most songs signals her status as the lead, and she also appears as the visual center of the group in photographs and during performances. The emphasis on the Ganser twins’ identical attributes, including their matching dark bouffants, provides 28

O U T I N T H E ST R E E T S

a striking contrast to the singular and central Mary with her long, sleek blonde hair. The Ganser and the Weiss sisters met at Andrew Jackson High where, like many girl-groups, they learned to sing in their school choir. All four grew up in Cambria Heights, a working-class neighborhood in Queens. The group’s Queens lineage is significant; it’s one of the few biographical nuggets we have that tethers the group to reality. Their provenance grounds them in the tough world they sing about and provides them with what I’m tempted to call a down-to-earth sense of earnestness. The title of a Gothamist article about the Shangri-Las highlights the surprise and importance of their neighborhood when it asks the following: “Was The Best Girl Band Ever From . . . Queens?”1 Queens, historically speaking, is hardly a contender for the title of most glamorous borough. Despite the fact that Queens has fostered many famous residents over the years, it doesn’t get very much credit. When I was in the planning stages of this book, a family friend, himself a lifelong New Yorker, pointed out to me the most obvious thread connecting the Shangri-Las to the New York Dolls. It wasn’t their rebelliousness, big hair, leather jackets or even that Shangri-Las’s producer George “Shadow” Morton produced the second New York Dolls album. It was as simple as the Dolls’s name itself, a location: New York. I will be the first to admit that you can’t just draw a straight line connecting every act originating in New York. And how very like two New Yorkers to sit around and talk about how great and important their city is. But truth be told, I do believe there’s something to the way the birthplace of the Shangri-Las resonates through their music and the later 29

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

New York bands they inspired. It’s bigger than just ShangriLas and the New York Dolls. The same force is at work on the Ramones’s album End of the Century which stands as one of the great links between punk and the girl-group era. End of the Century, an album by a Queens band, was produced by Phil Spector, a Bronx native. The album’s homage to the girl-group sound? A rendition of “Baby I Love You,” a song Spector wrote for The Ronettes, who hailed from Washington Heights. Just as Motown belongs to the legacy of Detroit, so too do the New York girl-groups belong to their city. That the Weiss and Ganser sisters grew up in Queens is a fact, but it’s a fact that’s open to various interpretations. Warwick’s book, in an uncharacteristic lapse of clarity, refers to the Shangri-Las as “a group of suburbanites from Queens”2 and later describes the group as having grown up “in difficult economic circumstances in a working-class Long Island Suburb.”3 Strictly speaking, Warwick’s assessment may be true—Queens is, technically, on Long Island. Long Island is made up of four counties: Nassau, Suffolk, Queens and Kings (better known as Brooklyn). But Long Island is almost always used to describe only the two former counties. Brooklyn and Queens, two of the five boroughs of New York City, are never referred to locally as Long Island. To call the ShangriLas Long Islanders is therefore misleading given the local understanding of place, as well as musically speaking given that a decent percentage of the Brill Building songwriters did actually hail from Long Island; Ellie Greenwich, for example, recalls dropping a line to the aspiring producer “Shadow” Morton after remembering that came from a similar areas on Long Island, levittown and Hicksville, respectively.4 As 30

O U T I N T H E ST R E E T S

to Cambria Heights being suburban, it is certainly true that residential parts of Queens and Brooklyn can more closely resemble the suburbs than they do the skyscraper-laden topography of Manhattan, but Queens is still more city than suburb and the Shangri-Las are not “suburbanites.” My intent is not to blame Warwick for being less than fully conversant in the intricacies of New York borough identities. These distinctions are, after all, almost ridiculously complicated and counterintuitive. Growing up in Brooklyn, for example, we always called Manhattan “the city.” But doing so seems to mislead outsiders who take us to mean that inhabitants of Brooklyn, and the other outer boroughs, do not consider themselves a part of the city. New Yorkers often have an inflexible view of the city in contrast to places like D.C. and Baltimore, where the city’s identity is often extended to, or claimed by, suburban areas nearby. New York is less elastic and far snobbier. New Yorkers don’t extend honorary membership to those in Westchester or the other two counties on Long Island. Placing Queens under the umbrella of Long Island deprives the Shangri-Las of a New York urban identity that I believe they visibly embody. For me, the Shangri-Las have always been a quintessentially New York group. Fifty years on, this urban identity seems to be a big aspect of their nostalgic appeal for baby boomers. People recall growing up in Queens in the mid-1960s and hearing the Shangri-Las on the radio. They claim the group with a sense of pride and share in the nostalgia of a particular time and place. YouTube comments on old videos of the Shangri-Las recall those posted by fans of Neil Diamond, another New York artist fondly remembered for his origin 31

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

story. Diamond grew up poor in Brooklyn and, according to the comments on a video for his autobiographical song “Brooklyn Roads,” so did many of his fans. To these fans, Diamond represents the American Dream, a triumph of talent over humble origins. But his songs also recall their now-idealized childhoods, a halcyon period when neighborhoods felt like communities of insiders and not the big, impersonalized city of today. Despite the fact that Diamond spent most of his adult life away from Brooklyn, the borough remains a part of his artistic identity. As he sings in “I am … I said”: “L.A.’s fine, but it ain’t home / New York’s home, but it ain’t mine no more.” Nevertheless, New York still belongs to him and, in a sense, he belongs to New York. “Sweet Caroline,” Diamond’s most famous recording, is a staple at sporting events today but nowhere does it come across with more emotion than when the song echoes out across the Coney Island boardwalk from MCU stadium, home of minor league baseball team the Brooklyn Cyclones. The suburbanizing of the Shangri-Las serves categorically to place them, in Warwick’s schema at least, as distinct from the other groups she discusses. They are the only white group in Warwick’s book, mainly because they are one of the only white girl-groups that holds up to the stellar quality of most of the girl-groups we still talk about today. The Angels, a white group from New Jersey, have maintained a smaller legacy with “My Boyfriend’s Back” but you’d be hard pressed to really come up with another one of their songs that anyone remembers today. Compare such a one-hit wonder to a group like the Crystals or Martha and the Vandellas who had hit after hit and it’s clear why so many other groups have faded 32

O U T I N T H E ST R E E T S

into the background. The Shangri-Las’s identity as a white group is certainly important, especially as their tough act was made possible at least in part by the possibility of presenting them with fewer constraints than those imposed on their black peers. Because they were white, they could be the “bad” girl-group yet still be acceptable to a wide audience in a way that would have been impossible for The Crystals or The Supremes. But Warwick creates a false dichotomy, one that is mainly predicated on the depiction of the Shangri-Las as spoiled suburban girls, in contrast to the almost stereotypical equation of blackness with urbanity. Warwick pushes this distinction further, particularly singling out Weiss’s voice, which “strained near the top of her vocal range, perfectly evokes the slightly smug, spoiled girl who enjoys impressing her friends with the drama and status her glamorous, dangerous, rebel boyfriend confers on her.”5 The assessment of the Shangri-Las’s penchant melodrama as “smug” feels wrong to me. They may be overly dramatic, and maybe even a little campy, but to suggest that their histrionics are simply an attempt to be cool and get attention seems like a misreading of the Shangri-Las’s entire tone. There’s passion and an urban edge to the songs that Warwick mistakes for a kind of lightweight suburban privilege. That Warwick dismissively describes Mary’s voice as whiny is significant. The fact that the girls sing and talk in their own accents, a nasally Queens flatness, serves as perhaps the most identifiable class marker in the music of the Shangri-Las. This feature, of course, is most noticeable with Mary, as she is the voice we hear most. But even in the dialogue at the beginning of “Leader of the Pack,” we hear 33

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

traces of a regional accent (notice the way that “after school,” becomes “aftuh school”). The girls’ accents are pronounced in the spoken parts of “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” where words like “talk” and “walk” become more rounded, as in the notorious (if hackneyed) example of a New York accent “I’m walkin’ heyuh.” The Shangri-Las have what some people call the New York “cawwfee” accent, a dialect that has undergone much examination recently due to its seemingly impending extinction. As Dan Nosowitz writes, The New York City dialect is very strong and pervasive but in an extremely small geographic area; basically, we’re talking about the five boroughs, the western half of Long Island, and a tiny pocket of northern New Jersey (primarily cities like Newark, Jersey City, and Hoboken). Unlike other dialects, like the Boston dialect, the New York City dialect doesn’t diffuse slowly throughout a large area surrounding the core. It stops very suddenly right around the Meadowlands, a gross part of New Jersey just a few miles outside New York City. Despite how many people live in New York, the actual geography of people who speak like New Yorkers is very small.6 The New York accent has become scarcer as people move in and bring with them a “standard” American accent, which Nosowitz describes as somewhat Midwestern in sound. Those with New York accents, conversely, are beginning to leave the city. The New York accent has been connected to social class for a long time. In a 1962 study, linguist William Labov observed the preponderance of New York accents in 34

O U T I N T H E ST R E E T S

three department stores on the low, medium, and high end of the price spectrum, respectively. Labov found that strong New York accents were more common in the lower end department stores and scarcer in the more expensive stores.7 The link between New Yorkers’s socioeconomic standing and the severity of their accent certainly accounts for the possible extinction of the dialect in coming years. As poorer inhabitants of the city are forced out because of prohibitively expensive living conditions, replaced by the wealthy or those moving in from other states, so too will the New York accent be replaced by a more standard American accent. The fact that the Shangri-Las use their accents, with no attempt at mitigation or affectation, sets them apart. Laurie Stras aptly contrasts the Shangri-Las’s accents with those of the Angels, writing that “the out-and-out rejection of the standard southern-inflected accent adopted by most popular singers gave their voice an even more untutored and, by implication, rebellious teen sound (compare Mary’s performances to Peggy Santiglia’s accomplished drawl on ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’).”8 In this way, the Shangri-Las are closer to a group like the Ronettes, who also sang in very recognizable New York accents. Their unabashed use of their native accent alone serves to separate the Shangri-Las from this arbitrary designation of “spoiled,” which would, in turn, automatically invalidate the tough, streetwise milieu offered up by their music. Were the Shangri-Las really tough? At the time, Cambria Heights was not necessarily a rough neighborhood. As Mary Weiss remembers, it was “middle-to low-middle class,” and “average.” Queens author Kurt Boone remembers 35

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

moving there in the mid-1960s from Brooklyn’s BedStuy neighborhood: Buying a house in Cambria Heights, at the time, was a symbol of success for many African-American families, and so it was for mine. The Greater Jamaica area, including Cambria Heights, St. Albans and Addisleigh Park, had become one of the city’s first middle-class African-American areas, over the years home to prominent residents like Count Basie, W.E. B. Dubois and Ella Fitzgerald.9 Boone moved there at a pivotal time for Cambria Heights; the neighborhood was in a significant period of “white flight.” Interestingly enough, both Ellie Greenwich and George Morton are examples of this pattern of white flight in the outer boroughs of New York: both spent their early years in Brooklyn but moved to Long Island as older children. Though Boone’s parents saw moving to the neighborhood as a step up in the world, as Boone moved on to high school in the early 1970s (at the very same Andrew Jackson high school that the Shangri-Las had attended), gangs and drugs had come to Cambria Heights and the surrounding area. Though Cambria Heights had not yet encountered the challenges it would face in successive decades, Mary Weiss does not remember her childhood fondly, recalling that many of her early years were spent in “abject poverty”10 largely due to her family’s socioeconomic standing, rather than her neighborhood. At the very least, the Weiss’s were in no way emblematic of the idealized suburban family— Mary and Betty’s father died in a work accident when they 36

O U T I N T H E ST R E E T S

were young, and Weiss had a troubled relationship with her mother after that. Both Mary and Betty, along with their older brother George, contributed financially to the family from a young age, especially as the Shangri-Las began to make hits. Unsurprisingly, Mary was too young to sign her own contracts at the time, so her mother was in charge of her career, a fact she still seems bitterly to resent. While it’s clear that the Shangri-Las are more an urban than suburban group, their toughness certainly does not hinge upon Cambria Heights. Had they followed a different path—that is, a normal adolescence—Cambria Heights may have remained, at least for a few years, a suburban-esque haven within the city. The Gansers, who seem to have been more affluent than the Weiss family, might have followed their neighbors and moved to Long Island or New Jersey. But, instead, the Shangri-Las grew up singing on an urban street. When Mary talks about her childhood, she describes a lack of “structure” or support. This would only be intensified once the Shangri-Las became popular. “I grew up on the road,” she recalls in a 2007 interview. “I had a road manager who was barely a couple years older than me. Kids were going to proms and I was getting press conferences in London. It’s quite a weird way to grow up.”11 Mary’s age initially kept the girls from playing in clubs and bars so, instead, their first official gigs were at school dances and hops. In this way, their origin story is almost helplessly quaint in contrast to that of the other “tough” girlgroup, the Ronettes. Ronnie Spector remembers trying to look old enough to get into clubs—specifically recalling her mother’s advice to stuff her bra and always hold a cigarette. 37

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

“The management was waiting for another girl-group,” Spector recalls of her big break. “We never found out what girl-group—we were standing on line and the management came outside, he said ‘girls, you’re late!’”12 Girl-group history seems to perpetually extol the value of the hustle—not just waiting around for your chance, but grabbing it by the horns. In the story of the Shangri-Las, the hustler is George “Shadow” Morton, their producer, and the man who wrote their first hit: “Remember.” Morton was a Brooklyn kid transplanted in his youth to Hicksville, Long Island, in an attempt by his parents to keep him away from juvenile delinquency. Apparently, this was a complete failure. Morton reportedly joined a Hicksville gang at the age of thirteen.13 At twenty-two, Morton wrote “Remember.” True to his tough adolescence and the moniker he would later receive, “Shadow,” “Remember” was case of sheer entrepreneurial bluff. Sure, many of the top songwriters at the Brill Building were young, but Morton had never even written a song before 1964. Morton, ambitious and broke, reconnected with successful songwriter Ellie Greenwich, a friend he had played music with back in Long Island. Morton’s big break came because of an altercation he had with Greenwich’s husband and songwriting partner, Jeff Barry. Morton, puffing out his chest, had told Barry he was a hit songwriter. Barry, most likely seeing right through Morton’s ambitious bluster, dared him to bring him a ballad.14 Morton was connected with the Shangri-Las through their manager at the time but, as legend has it, he had not yet written his ballad when he got the girls into the studio. The hustler supposedly wrote “Remember” in his car after he pulled over 38

O U T I N T H E ST R E E T S

to the side of the road on the way to the Long Island studio he had booked to record it. Legend also has it that that the original version of the song, which was much longer, featured a much younger Billy Joel on the piano.15 Much of the story rests on what might be no more than burnished lore, and this is probably the way Morton, who magicked himself into a career, wanted it. However the song came to be written and recorded, it’s difficult now to accurately experience how different a ballad like “Remember” sounded at the time. The era has come to be so defined by Phil Spector’s technical innovations and “wall of sound” that we think nothing else at that time could have possibly been innovative. But Morton’s productions weren’t just music productions, they were theatre. Almost every one of Morton’s contemporaries remembers his work as wholly realized mini-plays that seemed to emerge from his mind fully formed. “I made demands of Mary Weiss that were extraordinary,” said Morton in a later interview. “When you listen to her records today, and imagine that this is coming from a 15, 16 year old girl. . . . I was asking her to be an actress, not just a singer.”16 Ezra Pound had a classification system for writers,17 six “classes” that he believed every writer must fall under. First is “Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.” Following this is “The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.” All the way down at the bottom of Pound’s list is, simply put, “The Starters of Crazes.” I believe that for most people, and in most books about “girl-groups,” the ShangriLas are classified as this last category. They are charged with participating in a brilliant scheme, the packaging and sale of 39

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

ersatz teen angst, a fad-approach that made their tenure as a group impossible to maintain. There are some girl-groups that would fall under the category of masters. One such group is the Ronettes, who were simply the best at what they did. Ronnie Spector had a tremendous voice. The group’s sound and legacy are unparalleled. The Shangri-Las are not masters, but rather than designating them as “starters of crazes,” they instead fall under the category of “Innovators.” Both Morton’s visions and Weiss’s delivery were ahead of their time, operating on a plane that was remarkably different from that otherwise offered by the girl-group scene. The Shangri-Las’s formula is admittedly somewhat volatile. Another hard-edged girl-group song, “Nightmare”by Whyte Boots, a Shangri-Las-inspired tale of a girl fight turned fatal, is proof that the bad girl persona can quickly devolve into affectation and shock-tactics. “Nightmare,” with its dark subject matter, ghostly backing vocals, and spoken refrains deliberately wants to be mistaken for the Shangri-Las, but it lacks the edge of earnest believability that is always the silver lining of Shangri-Las’s songs. At the root of the Shangri-Las’s believability is how much of her personal life Mary Weiss brought into her performance. As she remembers of recording “Leader of the Pack,” I put a lot of my own pain into that song. I don’t think teenage years are all that rosy for a lot of people—they certainly weren’t for me. They are the most confusing time of people’s lives and there is a tremendous dark side to the record, which I think teenagers related to. The studio was a great place to let the pain out.18

40

O U T I N T H E ST R E E T S

Terms like “spoiled,” “smug” and “suburban” serve to defang the Shangri-Las and suggest that they make a mockery of the tough world they sing about. It’s plausible that neither the Weiss sisters nor the Gansers actually hung around the rough and tumble crowds we encounter in “Leader of the Pack” or “Out In the Streets,” at least before their star rose, but if accounts of Morton’s delinquency and troubled life are accurate, there is also reason to believe that the rebellious characters in Morton’s productions were real people to him—composites of shadowy characters from his past. Mary Weiss herself has, over the years, denied the conception of the group as “tough.” Her reasoning seems mostly to revolve around the group’s extreme youth—how could anyone have really found them tough or intimidating when they were only in their mid-teens? Though Weiss resists this label, she also doesn’t give any indication that others curated an image of toughness for the group. When asked about whether male bands hit on the Shangri-Las while they were on the road, Weiss responded, “We have such a tough image, supposedly, I think a lot of that comes from surviving. From making people back down.”19 Though Weiss finds the girls’ toughness laughable, she does provide solid reasons for that perception of the Shangri-Las. “We were 16-yearold kids on the road in a very tough, grown-up industry,” says Weiss. “We had no entourage, just one massive 19-yearold bodyguard, sometimes. I bought a pistol in Georgia . . . because fans were trying to break into our hotel rooms. [She later turned it in to police in Florida.] So, we were as tough as we needed to be. We had little to no protection on the road, and I usually carried the band’s cash. It was a scary 41

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

time.”20 Ellie Greenwich, one of the Shangri-Las’s primary songwriters, remembers the girls as the real deal. “I was sort of taken aback by them. . . . They were very tough-looking, they had a hardness about their ways. They would come in with the black stockings with the ripped stuff, and they’d be chewing gum and carrying on. I wasn’t quite used to that, not that I’m a goody-goody, but I wasn’t really quite used to that kind of scene.”21 The Shangri-Las certainly weren’t goody-goodies. When evaluating the realities of their songs, their claim to “the streets,” the prevalence of packs over families, it’s important to remember that we can make comparisons between this reality and the world of teenage performers. Over “The Streets” we can superimpose “The Road,” where the girls spent most of their time as a group. The Gang in the absence of a functional family bears resemblance to the conditions of a pop group in constant motion. “Out in the Streets” demonstrates to us the potency of a young rebel’s connection to his peers, his gang, which understands him in a way that no one in the “straight” world ever could. For the Shangri-Las, growing up in the spotlight, the girl-group itself becomes a substitute and substantive family, providing the same sense of belonging that the young rebel finds within his gang. “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” with its morality tale about a teen runaway, bears striking resemblance to Mary Weiss’s memories of guns and motels and missing her prom. All of it, not just some sheltered charade, but rather, the real world in action.

42

What Is Love?

What do we talk about when we talk about the ShangriLas? The drama, the angst, the disaster that makes the group unique—all of these things, ultimately, boil down to love. There it is, in its most essential form. But love is not static. It’s often a catalyst for some larger event or itself a conduit for subtext lurking beneath the love story. The oversimplification of girl-group music as representing one united, reactionary mindset is an idea I constantly attempt to dispel in this book; love, especially, has infinite meanings, and can often serve as a subtle, seemingly harmless subject of subversion. Of course, there are counterexamples to this claim. The Angels’s “My Boyfriend’s Back,” while attempting to trade in romantic or sexual scandal, is just one example of a song reeking of white-bread, picket-fence idealized womanhood. Peggy March’s fawning, albeit catchy, adoration of her boyfriend in “I Will Follow Him” is another particularly saccharine example. But alongside the saccharine and insipid, there are songs that ring true and become emotionally wrenching. I’ve already sung the praises of the Shirelles’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” as one of the most genuine and emotional songs of the girl-group era. And I would place on that same

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

tier the Shangri-Las own “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” a lament for familial love, which masterfully employs the underrated power of melodrama to reach emotional depths. What we’re dealing with in the case of the Shangri-Las is the possibility that within the values of the girl-group genre, long dismissed as inane and reactionary, love can become perverse and unusual. High-drama and tragic love can function as a strange and uncanny alternative to what love would immediately signify in many 1960s’ pop songs: marriage and the impending fusion of the nuclear family. If we examine the family unit in Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las, we can quickly see that it’s a wholly dysfunctional model. When parents are mentioned, they are often the “denier” that prompts the tragedy of the song. The concerned father in “Leader of the Pack,” who makes his daughter break up with her boyfriend, or the parents in “Give Us Your Blessings,” whose dismissal of the young couple’s relationship causes their disastrous elopement. In both cases, this misunderstanding by parents in fact proves fatal. But other than these cases of tragic tensions between children and parents, home life is conspicuously absent from the songs. The landscape of romance is intentionally isolated from the domestic world, a vacuum of sorts far from the traditional and sanctioned structure of marriage and family, the social reality for many of the girls listening to the Shangri-Las in the 1960s. You can compare the conspicuous absence of domesticity in the music of the Shangri-Las to the message of a song like the Shirelles’s “Mama Said” which follows the tradition of the lovelorn girl seeking her mother’s advice and consolation. This trope suggests the acknowledgment of love as something 44

W HAT I S L OV E ?

natural and appropriate, a necessary rite of passage. This idea of parental advice, often specifically maternal, extends far beyond girl-groups. Clarence Carter’s “It’s All in Your Mind” follows a similar principle, for example. Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World” is another example. But for the Shangri-Las, listening to mother’s advice is a fraught proposition: you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. This idea of counsel is of vital importance because girlgroup music often functioned as a model for adolescent girls to follow, for better or for worse. “Mama Said” hints at the didactic possibility of love songs; by relaying the mother’s advice, the song invites the listener in as a recipient of this guidance and perspective. But girl-group songs often interpret the role of the maternal advice giver in a somewhat looser fashion—rather than necessarily relying on “mother,” the singer herself can become the de facto advice giver. We can see the dynamic between the “telling” of the main singer and the agreement of the back-up singers, as representing a form of peer learning. We see the “Mama Said” convention persisting, as well as a new trend emerging in which peer counsel is key. As we see most dramatically in the ShangriLas that parental counsel might not be enough for the 1960s’ teenager. In Ted Gioia’s Love Songs: The Hidden History, we can trace the didacticism of girl-group songs back to ancient Greece, specifically, to the poet Sappho and her cult of female followers. Since so little survives of Sappho’s work, we are left to piece her legacy together through the words of others and Gioia looks to the work of Ovid to clue us in on 45

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

who Sappho was to her followers. Ovid asks the question: “What did Sappho of Lesbos teach her girls except how to love?”1 The jump from girl-groups to Sappho might seem a bit ponderous. But I wonder if that may be because we have fundamentally misunderstood Sappho’s poetry, directed as we are by our modern perceptions of what poetry is. Gioia writes that “although Sappho is typically remembered as a writer or poet, she was in fact what we would nowadays call a singer-songwriter. Her music was performed to the accompaniment of a lyre, hence the origin of the term lyric poetry, a label that would later be applied to spoken poems but initially referred to songs.”2 Gioia suggests that Sappho’s lyrics were affectionately didactic, a model for her female cohort. This scenario is not dissimilar to the reverence girls in the mid-1960s might have felt for the girl-group hits they heard on the radio which, as pop songs, could teach them about sex and romance in a way that no “serious” medium could. As I think about the way Sappho has been turned from a musician to a poet, I think also about how important context is to a group like the Shangri-Las. There is a temptation, deeply rooted in misogyny, to think about the Shangri-Las as discreet, and to a certain extent, transcendent of their intended audience. Sappho’s elevated status is dependent on her inclusion within the realm of poetry, rather than music. So too, the ShangriLas have to be better than pop. I want also to point out the irony of bringing Gioia in here; as we have already seen, his fairly elitist stance on socalled degeneracy of “poptimism” would certainly make him shudder at the thought of connecting Sappho to the 46

W HAT I S L OV E ?

Shangri-Las (throughout Love Songs, Gioia conspicuously leaves out girl-groups in favor of crooners and female jazz singers). My book may be full of retroactive, anachronistic claims but to me there is a joy in disregarding the canon for a moment and thinking about Sappho and her followers as a fifth-century BCE girl-group. Gioia himself inadvertently makes the claim: “Perhaps Sappho performed some songs in the context of a dance or a ritual involving movement by the participants, but the intimate, expressive quality of her lyrics suggests that many of them were presented in less ceremonial settings, probably in small gatherings of women.”3 Pop music also operates in these modes, both as a shared experience, the screaming fan at a concert, and as a private one, the fan listening privately at home. However, Gioia is quick to clarify that these were not love songs in the way we know them today: “These lyrics may not match our stereotypical notions of love songs, especially those from the later Western traditions of romantic or sentimental music. Expressions of same-sex love predominate, and cover the full range of emotional responses from respectful affection to jealous eroticism.”4 But as Patricia Juliana Smith, author of “Ask Any Girl: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Girl Group Culture,” might counter, varying degrees of same-sex love exist in even the most supposedly “stereotypical” songs, namely ones in which girls sing about boys. “While The Boy is both subject and object of girl-group fantasies,” writes Smith, “he is only rarely a physical presence in these mini-melodramas. Absent, in love with someone else, dead, merely fantasized, or otherwise disembodied, The Boy exists primarily in the third person for 47

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

the lead singer/persona, while the second-person preceptors are other girls.”5 Smith argues that girls of the 1950s and the 1960s would have been so sexually repressed, so separated from their “compulsory heterosexuality,” that The Boy would have been a mere fantasy to be shared between the lead singer and back-up singers. “In this manner,” writes Smith, “girlgroup music functioned, throughout a decade of sea-changes in sexuality, as a demotic adolescent female form of what has come to be known in critical discourse as ‘homosociality.’”6 What is puzzling with the Shangri-Las is to figure out what is being shared in this dynamic of girl-talk which usually centers around the future, that is, “One Fine Day” (The Chiffons) or “Maybe” (The Chantels). “Give Us Your Blessings” is the only song on Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las that even mentions marriage; if marriage is the “endgame,” then the Shangri-Las represent an attitude about it that is surprisingly ambivalent. The disastrous outcome of “Give Us Your Blessings” suggests, in fact, a fearful attitude toward marriage. But mostly, the issue just doesn’t come up. This love doesn’t have to be concerned about the future; often, it is conveniently cut short by tragedy, before the drudgery of marriage and adulthood begins. What is perhaps most disturbing in “Leader of the Pack” is that despite its morose content, it is a musically euphoric song. Though Mary Weiss’s spoken parts are at first glum, by the time the singing starts in earnest, she shifts in tone to something akin to the ecstatic. The song vacillates between these two tones, and we hear this juxtaposition most sharply during the final twenty seconds of the song when the song drops the standard girl-group beat, a rhythm so ubiquitous 48

W HAT I S L OV E ?

that its absence is keenly felt. At the penultimate moments of the song, we hear the chilling, dirge-like wailing of the Ganser twins, a funereal atmosphere that is shaken by the finale, the choruses of “gone, gone, gone” overlapping feverishly with the screeching crash of the motorcycle. The peppy tragedy of “Leader of the Pack” represents the peak of the morbid fascination the Shangri-Las are known for; their hyper-tragic girl-talk eschews wholesome ideas of marriage or commitment, embracing instead the new social cachet of risk and calamity, objects of pride and envy. Calamity, facilitated by the bike crash in “Leader of the Pack,” and the jilting boyfriend of “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” functions as the interruption of the natural progression toward conventional adulthood. If these relationships ever worked out, instead of coming to tragic ends, culminating in marriage and the adoption of the traditional values accompanying it, these songs would lose their edge. But as tragedy creates bragging rights among the singers, we see their languid delight in the notion of opting out. While the homosociality that Smith speaks of is certainly present in many of the songs on Golden Hits of the ShangriLas, the Shangri-Las are unique in the way that they approach the insubstantiality of The Boy. As Smith suggests, The Boy represents the macabre element of heterosexual fantasy. She writes that “the elements of advice and the shared male fantasy object were all there, but the advice was either poorly heeded or of no avail in a world in which unsympathetic parents, and by extension, society at large conspired to keep the teen heroine from redeeming through her love 49

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

the street-tough boy of her desires.”7 Smith, like many girl-group critics dismissive of the Shangri-Las’s dramatic tendencies, concludes that “these stylistic innovations were not enough to give the Shangri-Las their permanent place in rock history; rather their most memorable accomplishment was the incorporation of necrophilia into the already stale convention of fantasy boys shared among girls.”8 Smith points to these instances of necrophilia as the perfect way to preserve The Boy as a fantasy that will never change, one that will never have to be acted on. But there’s more to this version of necrophilia. It’s a gender reversal on a classic Romantic theme, the trope of the dead lover, immortalized forever as young and beautiful. From Byron’s Manfred, in which the titular character is haunted by thoughts of his lost love Astarte, to the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, it’s a device that rarely changes direction. Perhaps the best example I can think of is Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems,” a set of five elegies centered around a fictionalized, idealized young woman who exists only in the speaker’s memory. Lucy is still alive in the first poem, her death a mere fantasy that strikes the speaker. Alive, she is a flimsy character; after her death she is no longer a person but a dead body and her ephemerality increases. In the final poem of the series, Wordsworth writes, “No motion has she now, no force; / She neither hears nor sees;  /  Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,  /  With rocks, and stones, and trees.”9 Throughout the series, Wordsworth eroticizes the dead woman in a way that is quietly fetishistic; if not necrophilia, it is an attraction to the woman’s absence, her immateriality. 50

W HAT I S L OV E ?

The macabre sexuality of “Leader of the Pack” eroticizes The Boy in a way that is similarly fetishistic, but the fact that it is, for once, adolescent girls in the role of eroticizer makes all the difference. There’s another way in which I see the Shangri-Las complicating Smith’s theory: Both “Leader of the Pack” and “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” show an eroticizing of The Boy that isn’t, in fact, based in ephemerality at all. Most interesting, instead, is just how physically present The Boy is in the song. Smith’s case for the presence of homosociality in girl-group songs hinges on the fact that The Boy is usually addressed as a third-person figure; in a sense, he is unseeable and at the same time he could be anybody. In his ubiquitousness, the Boy dutifully serves as unquestionable proof of heterosexuality. But The Boy in the Shangri-Las is a type and that type is very specific. Just as the Shangri-Las’s songs don’t fit under the category of “ask any girl,” the “good-bad, not evil” The Boy doesn’t quite seem to fit as the every-guy. The idea of the “bad boy” from the “wrong side of the tracks” does not itself represent any particular innovation: the trope was taking shape through Marlon Brando and James Dean long before the Shangri-Las were on the scene. Other groups were experimenting with the “bad boy.” The Crystals’ 1962 hit “He’s a Rebel” centers around such a figure. But the main point of departure between the Crystals “bad boy” and that of the Shangri-Las is that the Crystals follow more closely the “any-guy” of Smith’s homosocialization theory. The fact that he “doesn’t do what everyone else does” is his defining characteristic. Other than that, we are left to rely only on the way the 51

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

singer expresses her feelings for any idea of what he’s really like. He is shakily subjective. The Shangri-Las, however, go into great detail in their description of the “bad boy.” “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” features a full physical description of The Boy, something that rarely happens in girl-group songs. We usually don’t get to see The Boy in any specific, physical detail—that would take away from his universality. But The Boy of “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” in his “tight tapered pants, high button shoes” is very visible. We’ve already broached the topic of “gaze.” It’s often the elephant in the room. For all of the hits written by Carol King or Ellie Greenwich, there are as many written by Shadow Morton or Leiber and Stoller. The female narrative, then, is often problematic because it was written by a man. But as Warwick suggests, even so the music relies on the female gaze which is often fully present in performance and vocalization. The singer’s perspective on herself can be a source of empowerment like it is for Warwick’s young girl dancing in front of a mirror. But what we also see through the ShangriLas is that the female gaze for once can be directed toward The Boy. Through songs like “Out In The Streets,” “Leader of the Pack” and especially “Give Him A Great Big Kiss,” we are actually given an image of what The Boy looks like. Unlike the disembodied, idealized male figure of other girlgroup love songs who remains generic and largely invisible, the Shangri-Las objectify The Boy so that he appears as a physical presence in the songs. So why is this important? Well, for one thing, you don’t hear nearly as many love songs of the “boys singing about 52

W HAT I S L OV E ?

girls” variety that focus on marriage and respectability. At least not as many as you might hear on a mix of girl-group songs. While the Beach Boys offer a buttoned-up dream of mainstream domestic bliss in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” they also have the “rockin and a-reeling” of “Barbara Ann.” The year 1967 found Van Morrison nostalgically depicting a heady romance in “Brown-Eyed Girl” that, presumably, did not end in marriage after the couple in the song made love in the green grass behind the stadium. So when the ShangriLas offer a version of sexuality in a woman’s voice that isn’t bound by the more conservative and bodiless conventions of love, it feels significant. In “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” what could just be a wholesome kiss becomes more. The girl-talk reveals to us a surprising element of lust as Mary Weiss describes The Boy’s dancing as “close, very, very close.” We see a similar departure from the girl-group mores in “Sophisticated Boom Boom,” the penultimate song on Golden Hits. Stylistically, it’s a departure from the other songs; it’s got an R&B feel that seems more Ray Charles than Phil Spector. The narrative is subtly rebellious. The Girl, alone at night, wanders aimlessly after being jilted by a date when she stumbles upon a dance hall. We get the idea that the music is not what she is used to hearing, the dance too is new to her. But instead of balking, instead of leaving, The Girl “grabbed this little boy who came struttin’ across the room.” Here we see the independence and assertiveness so prized in Leslie Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.” The notion of being “on display” is anathema to Gore—and in “Sophisticated Boom Boom” the strut of The Boy suggests that he, not The 53

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

Girl, is the one on display. Though jilted earlier in the night, or maybe because of that fact, The Girl is not going to wait around anymore. The verb “grab” is unusually forward, even sexually aggressive. One of the biggest clues we get is in the back-up vocal we hear from the wings: “That’s not very sophisticated!” The listener is not the only one who notices that The Girl is bucking societal norms. The motorcycle in “Leader of the Pack” is an equally important extension of The Boy’s persona and the sound effect of the revving engine is highly suggestive of his latent sexuality. It’s hard to hear that sound without conjuring up the eroticized machinery of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, which also focuses on the Dean-Brando aesthetic, long shots lingering on similarly clad bikers, who could easily stand in for the “Leader of the Pack.” As a companion to a showing of the film at the Walker Art Center, critic Ed Halter penned a “Listener’s Guide” to Scorpio Rising, noting the way that the film innovatively used pop and youth-oriented music to an artistic end. Halter notes the dissonant use of Peggy March’s “Wind-Up Doll,” which is, unsurprisingly, just as demeaning as her aforementioned “I Will Follow.” Halter writes that March’s voice plays over a montage of bikers fixing motorcycle engines intercut with footage of wind-up toy bikes. The sound of a tiny clockwork motor being wound by a key—a clever bit of nontraditional instrumentation used in the song—perfectly matches shots of a biker twisting a wrench as he works. Thus, a correspondence emerges between the woman, the toy, and the machine,

54

W HAT I S L OV E ?

all subject to male manipulation. Motorcycles are just big boy’s toys, fetish objects that play the role of the beloved.10 Perhaps I’m begging the question of whether we can see “Leader of the Pack” as offering similar of the machine-asfetish-object and the way a woman is and isn’t a man’s “toy.” If so, how does the notion of “male manipulation” change? We know that The Girl of “Leader” is not Peggy March’s “wind-up doll.” If she is subject to manipulation, it is at the hands of her father, who insists that she break up with her biker boyfriend. But ultimately, it is The Girl who does the heartbreaking that results in the Boy’s untimely crash. In a sense, it’s a reversal of the dynamic that Halter sees in Scorpio Rising: The Girl exerting power on the Boy, and by proxy, his machine. I often think that the Shangri-Las’s reputation, and that of many of their contemporaries, suffers from their focus on love songs. Perhaps it’s a culturally inherited bias against “insipid” love songs, against girls singing about boys, against the perspective of the adolescent girl in general, so often dismissed as irrational and frivolous. Most often, these songs are offered as proof of how limited the music is by its reactionary focus on stereotypical depictions of femininity. But one only has to listen closely to note that Peggy March’s “Wind-Up Doll” and Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” offer two vastly different takes on the issue of ownership. Rather than defaulting to stereotypes when taking up the subjects of love and ownership from a woman’s perspective, the ShangriLas also offer divided and contradictory viewpoints that complicate the genre. The restrained agony of The Supremes’s

55

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

“Where Did Our Love Go” could hardly provide a greater contrast to the unbridled wail that defines the Shangri-Las’s “Remember,” which is an unashamedly bitter lament of lost love. When Mary Weiss tells us “she’s blowing her cool,” perhaps we need that nearly sardonic commentary to tell us that we’re leaving Peggy March, and our preconceived notions about girl-group music behind.

56

At the Moment, It Doesn’t Look Good

If love songs are the primary product of the Shangri-Las, melodrama is the means of production. This mode of delivery is essential to an understanding of the Shangri-Las in their full idiosyncrasy, representing what would be philosophically termed their haecceity. Haecceity and, along with it, quiddity, refer to the respective “thisness” and “whatness” of a thing;1 both revolve around the essence of a thing, quiddity especially on the pinning down of the inherent values, the properties that are intrinsic to something’s being. Haecceity is the singularity of these intrinsic qualities, the ineffable uniqueness of something. That melodrama is the Shangri-Las’s haecceity is true in many senses. First, it’s necessary to acknowledge that this particular facet of their music is the attribute by which they are best remembered. We can refer back to Smith’s dismissal of the Shangri-Las lasting power (supposedly inferior because of its use of kitsch and shock value) or most other write-ups of the Shangri-Las, to see that they are saluted for bubblegum rebellious pouts and fashion choices, but not

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

often for contributions to the girl-group sound as a whole. The thing to remember, of course, is that the memory of the Shangri-Las is a memory of a collective; it not only includes the singers but the songwriters and producer too. A good deal of this dismissal of the Shangri-Las reflects also upon their producer, George “Shadow” Morton, by many accounts an admirer of Phil Spector’s. This influence triggers a suspicion of slavish imitation which has followed the music: the feeling that the Shangri-Las are classed-down, off-brand wannabes. By this metric, Mary Weiss’s nasal voice is not nearly as effortlessly charismatic as Ronnie Spector or Darlene Love’s, and Morton’s productions lack the subtlety of Spector’s touch. But I can say without revisionism that Morton was aiming at something different with the Shangri-Las than Spectorimitation, though Spector’s influence remains audible. While the Shangri-Las are often derided and dismissed for their melodrama, that very quality is also the most important element of their music. As I have suggested, this melodrama distinguishes them from the model set forth by Phil Spector, a model that has essentially structured the critical memory of girl-groups. Perhaps the best way to parse this melodrama is to enter into a song that seems to define the Shangri-Las’s moniker of “myrmidons of melodrama.”2 “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” is the emotional core of Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las, representing the moment when the group’s drama is most plausible, most wrenching. In a literal sense, too, “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” is, at track six of twelve, the center of the album. It’s a strange proposition to consider song order on a greatest hits compilation. It would 58

AT T H E M OM E N T, I T D O E SN ’ T L O O K G O O D

be difficult, albeit interesting, to talk to the behind-thescenes individuals who made those choices. “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” is sandwiched between “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and “Out in the Streets,” but that melancholy stretch of songs is bookended by the breezy and cheerful “Heaven Only Knows” and “Give Him a Great Big Kiss.” The album is full of these ups and downs, plunging us into baroque moroseness and then bringing us up briefly for air. But after track six, I’m not sure if we bounce back to emotional equilibrium. The soap-opera tragedy of “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” somehow seems irreversible, as though it won’t go away at the end of the half-hour. The Shangri-Las begin “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” with a threat: “I’m gonna run away.” But when lead singer Mary Weiss comes in, she changes the trajectory of the song with one word: “don’t.” This don’t serves as a headline of sorts for the cautionary tale. Weiss takes the “mama said” trope to new dramatic heights, the emphatic direct address, spoken rather than sung, gives us the feeling that the stakes are higher. Something else happens at this pivotal point: the piano and tambourine drop out completely as Weiss’s nearly listless voice resounds in the thunderous quiet. When the instrumentation comes back in, the bassline enters alone at first, low and crawling and sinister, Weiss’s voice still at the forefront of the song, devoid of any other instrumental distraction: “Cause you can never go home anymore.” “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” tells the story of a young girl finding love, only to be told by her mother that she is too young. When her mother tells her to break up with the boy, she runs away. The girl’s mother dies of a broken 59

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

heart, of loneliness, as the song tells us. The instrumentation is stripped down—the Gansers leave out the girl-talk for a more somber, almost dirge-like wail. The beat is kept by a skeletal tambourine, rattling like chains, until the strings come in at the thunderous climax. All three girls join in, layering their voices while Weiss shrieks: Mama!  “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” is a song of self-aware sentimentality. Despite understanding why someone might dismiss it as an example of cloying hysteria, I am nevertheless affected by it, though not necessarily by an empathy born of realism. The song ends in a wash of catharsis, yet the story itself remains unresolved. This is one of those songs that people tend to love in an ironic way, as though it is too cheesy to enjoy without acknowledging their distance from its stagey melodrama. Mitchell Morris’s The Persistence of Sentiment is a wonderfully judicious exploration of the derided side of pop, probing the musical legacy of pop artists such as Barry White, Cher, Dolly Parton and Barry Manilow, artists who are dearly loved by many people, but critically recognized by very few. He notes this paradox in our “guilty pleasures”: I have often noted a disparity between the songs and styles many people seem to love to listen to—those they play in the privacy of their own homes, the ones that send them into paroxysms of delighted recollection, those they remember in remarkably detailed fashion—and the songs and styles that tend to get written about in vigorous, critically engaged terms. Even though popular music has acquired a significant measure of scholarly respectability,

60

AT T H E M OM E N T, I T D O E SN ’ T L O O K G O O D

it has often seemed that this measure is extremely selective. An extensive section of the pop music repertory still seems resistant to the praise of critics and intellectuals.3 Mitchell is very clear on the distinction that the reluctance to take pop music seriously doesn’t come out of the notion that we consider that music to be bad, per se. In fact, he would suggest that for many people it is extremely rewarding and enjoyable. But in this kind of enjoyment, we encounter a hiccup. Music can be too good, too satisfying: The accusation of kitschiness is one of those places where morals merge with aesthetics, since the badness of kitsch almost always has to do with the problem of truth and lies. We think of the kitsch artifact as “too pretty”; it has been described as “beauty with the ugly taken out.” The world it portrays has only positive moments, and the glib idealizations of the content represented through the object allow those of us who appreciate the object to pretend that everything is, simply, “nice.”4 The Shangri-Las present an interesting problem: Can a song be about ugly subject matter, and still have “the ugly taken out”? The simplest answer is “yes” . . . in a sense. The goal of girl-group music, essentially, is to make everything nice. Or, to be more precise, to make everything danceable. The extreme catchiness of “Leader of the Pack,” and to a lesser extent, “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” is the result of rendering ugly tragedy in a beautified form. To develop the comparison to a soap opera, this catchiness is tragedy without the ugly-crying.

61

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

Morris is right to touch on a moralistic repugnance at the idea of faking or exaggerating tragedy in the way that the Shangri-Las do. This notion of lies, or unbelievability, is where the term “melodrama” comes into play. There is more to this quality of unbelievability than just amateurism or hysteria, more to tease out about its effects on the listener. For many “melodrama” circles back to the larger question of authenticity surrounding girl-groups, a feeling that massproduced emotion, even if once genuine, cannot help but be cheapened along the way. But I suspect that there is something more crucial to our basic understanding of melodrama that makes us place the Shangri-Las into a category that is below actual “tragedy.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives a definition of “melodrama” as the following: Originally: a stage play, usually romantic and sensational in plot, and interspersed with songs, in which the action is accompanied by orchestral music appropriate to the various situations (now hist.). Later (as the musical element ceased to be regarded as essential): a play, film, or other dramatic piece characterized by exaggerated characters and a sensational plot intended to appeal to the emotions.5 By this definition, the Shangri-Las hit all the features of melodrama. Their songs are certainly theatrical, even utilizing sound effects to illustrate the drama. Most notable are the motorcycle and car crashes in “Leader of the Pack” and “Give Us Your Blessings,” which reward the reader with an exciting and illustrative departure from the verbal 62

AT T H E M OM E N T, I T D O E SN ’ T L O O K G O O D

storytelling. “Remember” also utilizes sound effects, this time to cast a wave of nostalgia over the song. When Mary Weiss sings the titular chorus, the listener hears the sound of crashing waves and bleating seagulls just below the other elements of the song. Audible but distant, these sounds evoke the hazy realm of memory. Typically, girl-group music stayed away from the bluntness of sound effects in favor of the obliqueness of the orchestral gesture which might suggest an emotion without, for example, throwing the caw of a seagull in there. A secondary definition for “melodrama” is a little more colloquial: “More generally: any sensational incident, series of events, story, etc.; sensationalist or emotionally exaggerated behaviour or language; lurid excitement.” What comes into play in this definition is an implicit value judgment; “exaggerated” and “sensational” give way to “lurid,” a word with less than neutral connotations. Thus, dramatic effect becomes garish and unwholesome, even nefarious. If tragedy, a serious category, and melodrama, its farcical twin, rely on similar conventions to invoke emotional responses, where do we draw the line between the two, and why is one better than the other? The distinction between melodrama and tragedy is ancient and murky. According to classicist Thomas Gould, the difference between tragedy and melodrama can be discerned in Plato’s idea of pathos: A pathos is an event that leaves the audience or reader with the impression that human happiness is not in human control and that bitter unfairness prevails to a much

63

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

greater degree than philosophers and non-philosophers alike want consciously to be the case. If this is indeed a correct account of the essence of tragedy it should help us to differentiate true tragedy from pseudotragedy: melodrama and sentimental stories. By “melodrama” I mean (rather arbitrarily) a story that may have as much violence and suffering as the greatest tragedies, but which reinforces our hunger for justice. By “sentimental stories” I mean dramas or narrative that may depict as much unmerited suffering as the greatest tragedies, but imply a worldview that offers solace, reassurance, even subtle promises of triumph and joy.6 Melodrama differs from tragedy in the offer of relief or, as Aristotle would later positively frame it in his Poetics, catharsis. As draconian as it sounds, this hierarchy is still found in modern audiences. We tend to consider a drama that ends too happily as trivial, worse still if we know it’s going to end happily from the very beginning. We tend to feel greater respect for dramas that end ambiguously or do not resolve themselves at all by the end. With these distinctions in mind, I’m struck by the way “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” does not resolve itself. There is a great deal of ambiguity in the story—after about a hundred listens, I still have no idea how the girl’s story ends. What happens seems to be a sort of bait and switch. By moving out of her mother’s house the girl gives up her childhood in favor of the adult world, but the bleakness of the adult world leaves her longing for her home again. But while the song partly engages in nostalgia and mourning for

64

AT T H E M OM E N T, I T D O E SN ’ T L O O K G O O D

“home” as a stand-in for the way things were, “home” also becomes a literal space when we learn that her mother has died. When that narrator tells us that she can never go home anymore, she means it in the strictest sense. Her home no longer exists. More troubling is the easiness with which the boy, who sparked the girl’s conflict with her mother, exits the story. The girl forgets him “right away” and instead thinks of being with her mother again. The mother’s death, then, is all for naught, as is the girl’s abandoning of her home. In the end, what is she left with? I have always wondered about the practicalities of the girl’s predicament. If she cannot go back to her childhood home and she has forgotten the “miraculous” boy, where is she living? Is she really as alone as the song makes her out to be? We do not find in the tragedy of the Shangri-Las a definite tendency toward resolution or even catharsis. If those qualities are present, they reside in the perverse satisfaction that death and tragedy sometimes seem to bring. But there’s another identifier of melodrama which links the ShangriLas to a more traditional, theatrical definition of the term. I mentioned previously the outlandishness of Morton’s use of sound effects, particularly in his more sprawling productions, such as “Remember,” “Leader of the Pack” and even “Give Us Your Blessings.” These songs act as theatre, complicated productions with lots of parts and components: soliloquies, sound effects, an emphasis less on danceability, more on a complex Wagnerian model of rising and falling action. Morton’s use of sound effects is an undoubtedly gauche move. For proof of this, you can simply compare it to 65

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

Phil Spector’s production of the Ronettes “Walking in the Rain,” a subtler example of how sound effects can become instrumentation. Spector blends thunder into the percussive elements of the song and uses cascading backing vocals to suggest the fall of rain. Morton’s effects do not blend into the songs, as they are not naturalistic. You can’t mistake the car crash of “Gives Us Your Blessings” for instrumentation. There’s no question about whether Morton’s production are uncouth or whether the Shangri-Las are slightly tacky. We know them to be so. The question, rather, is what these qualities do for the listener. Hearing a song by the Shangri-Las, the listener is removed from the drama, not able to be successfully convinced. In a sense, this skepticism approaches Brecht’s “distancing effect,” which seeks to disrupt the viewer’s passive absorption of theatre and force viewers to acknowledge the conceits and constructs of the play. As Elinor Fuchs writes, Far from being rigidly or falsely unified, the theatre of estrangement thrives on a separation of dramaturgical elements. In theatre practising estrangement (or, in its many variants, distancing, defamiliarization, making the familiar strange, alienation), the spectator’s experience in every dimension of the dramatic spectacle is divided and even conflicted: the actor stands aside from her character, whom she “demonstrates”; the action is framed by commentary, or in Brecht’s term, “literarized”; the action reflects the material conditions of the stage figures, or is “historicized”; and the stage picture itself is broken up to reveal how theatre is made—no more seducing the viewer

66

AT T H E M OM E N T, I T D O E SN ’ T L O O K G O O D

into a fictive elsewhere. Above all, Brecht wanted to avoid the sentimental fusion of spectator and spectacle through the manipulation of “empathy.”7 Brecht’s estrangement served to buck what he saw as the “niceness” of theatre, always palatable and convincing. The Shangri-Las’ and Brecht’s estrangement might appear antithetical if we see the Shangri-Las according to Morris’s definition of kitsch as something beautiful “with the ugly taken out.” But as I have already suggested, their very “ugliness” makes it difficult to think of them this way: the nasality of Weiss’s voice, the clunkiness of Morton’s sound effects, all of which complicate our passive enjoyment of the songs. Furthermore, I would argue that outlandish sentimentality isn’t meant to approach truth and, in this way, inherently calls attention to itself as a creation, a fiction. The believability of daytime soaps pales in comparison to the hyperrealism of high-budget HBO dramas. To recall Morris’s invocation of morality, the lie is less insidious. The Shangri-Las’s relationship to melodrama is thus more complicated than usually suggested, as is the role of melodrama itself. It’s important to acknowledge that gender stereotypes strongly color how the Shangri-Las penchant for drama has been perceived. Melodrama has come to exist, colloquially at least, as a gendered label, not too far off from “hysteria” and “histrionics,” characteristics we associate with “overblown” female emotions. This in itself is somewhat puzzling. When I first saw James Dean’s most iconic movie, Rebel Without a Cause, for example, I couldn’t help but be aware of how Dean’s surly overacting now seems a caricature

67

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

of the put-upon adolescent, though I was certainly aware of its significance to the cultural development of the American teenager. In one of the most famous scenes, Dean, drunk at the police station, confronts his parents with one of the character’s most recognizable lines: “You’re tearing me apart! You—you say one thing, he says another thing, and everybody changes back again!” Red-faced, veins bulging, he wails his protest like an infant. What draws me into the emotionally taxing world of the Shangri-Las is the audacity of female emotion on display, the way the songs allow angst to be acted out by girls for once. The fact that the music creates a space for female emotion makes me resentful of the way melodrama is devalued and undermined in most critical accounts of the group. We understand melodrama as a fact of the teenage imagination—a hormonal funhouse mirror distorting reality—but the hormone-driven worlds of boys and girls are not created equal in the public imagination. “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” is a song somber in tone, but with elements of disruption. The eerie spell of the lullaby near the end of the song is broken by Weiss’s primal scream: Mama, like shouting at a funeral. I take a certain delight in Mary Weiss’s melodrama, which is finally a set of brassy refusals: a refusal to be quiet, to be ladylike, to shine it on and pretend everything is going to be just fine.

68

Shangri-La, or Tomorrow’s a Long Way Off

For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll confess that “Past, Present and Future” struck me at first as a rather dour and depressing song. For anyone listening to Golden Hits for the first time, this one may be a bit of a slog to get through. “Past, Present and Future” shadows Beethoven’s moonlight sonata and the song is devoid of singing. Instead of singing, Weiss’s voice speaks over the stark instrumentation in a somewhat enervated monologue. Her tone is unchanging, listless. The Ganser twins, usually a bundle of boisterous energy, join her only on the spoken refrains of “past,” “present” and, you guessed it, “future.” The story itself is familiar. It follows the same schema as “Remember”: young love gone sour, a girl left behind to pick up the pieces. But where “Remember” finds the Girl in a raucous, cathartic lament, “Past, Present and Future” leaves the opposite impression. The song seems paradoxically to be both the most melodramatic song on the album, and somehow, the least. Weiss’s spoken part rids the song of any musical whimsicality. The song’s gloom isn’t alleviated

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

by the poppy structure found in other Shangri-Las songs. It’s the song that provokes the most eye-rolling, seems the most ponderous, but despite its overblown proportions, it is, in a sense, also anti-melodramatic. It offers no catharsis, no ecstatic experience of tragedy. It is a song of depression rather than lamentation. The Shangri-Las can be dark, chilling even, but something about this particular song lacks the intrigue of their usual drama, the sordid, fascinating draw. Ultimately the biggest thing it has working against it is any resemblance to a pop song. The magic of the Shangri-Las (or, if you’re a cynic, their shtick) is the brilliant use of unsuspecting pop for nefarious ends, the way they effortlessly get you to hum along to a car crash, tap your feet to heartbreak. But as Devin McKinney puts it, “‘Past, Present and Future’ was almost a self-parody. All the familiar elements came back dressed as gimmicks: dolorous narration, a waltz-time interlude, the solipsistic romance of doom.”1 McKinney similarly picks up on the feeling that the listener trudges through the gloom rather than being transported by it. It is this feeling of effort that makes the song feel like a tired, desperate attempt at recapturing an old energy. Such a response is not lessened by hindsight—knowing this would be the Shangri-Las’s last release only makes the song feel even more bleak, hopeless even. But McKinney sees something that I did not at first, a saving grace of sorts: It was only the singing of Mary Weiss that kept kitsch from taking over. Her voice was cracked at the edges, and her hopelessness sounded too thick and unglamorous to

70

SHA N G R I - L A , O R T OM O R R OW ’ S A L O N G WAY O F F

register as a pop diva’s fatuous showboating. In an act of some bravery, Weiss took an embarrassing lyric, stood dead-center of a musical setting that begged for parody, and made the whole thing mean something—by, I imagine, never once assuming that either she or her audience was superior to the emotions the record sought to exploit.2 This vindication is perhaps the most judicious thing that has ever been written about the Shangri-Las. McKinney sets forth the possibility that, contrary to the typical narrative of girlgroups—which tells of passable singers working with great material—here we have a singer drawing greatness out of a lackluster song. Weiss was able to find genuineness in a song that was never meant to be genuine. What was McKinney seeing that I wasn’t? Maybe I should clarify that this song is often a divider for Shangri-Las fans. Some love it, some don’t. The thought that “Past, Present and Future” could have ever had chart aspirations seems ludicrous. Weiss’s vocal performance certainly lends an understated greatness to the uninspired composition of the song, but it isn’t even really the music that makes it seem like an unlikely hit. It’s something more cerebral. I called the song “dour” before, but maybe the word I was looking for was something more akin to “ennui.” What’s off-putting about “Past, Present and Future” is that it’s a loose seam in the otherwise neatly sewn world of the Shangri-Las, where melancholy is beautiful, jangly and cathartic. The song gapes wide and reveals another humor hidden beneath, a phlegmatic pessimism. “At the moment, it doesn’t look good,” Weiss says, collapsing any hope for the catharsis that tears might bring.

71

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

Melodrama is one of the most recognizable aspects of the Shangri-Las, but working in tandem with melodrama is a true and sometimes understated attitude of pessimism. It’s not as showy as the melodrama that we see in the ShangriLas’s epic swells of emotion, but it’s twice as pervasive. It’s a feeling that can’t be shaken, can’t be exorcized through ecstatic song. Though Golden Hits is a greatest hits album, the songs seem to reflect off of one another, and this pessimism especially seeps out and spreads even to songs that I would not immediately classify as a tragic. “Long Live Our Love,” like “Past, Present and Future,” is a deeper cut in the discography of the Shangri-Las. It’s noveltyheavy, a cheery war-morale tune that seems entirely unlike the apocalyptic adolescent world we are immersed in by the time we get to it at track nine. The song begins with an old civil war anthem called “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” a gimmicky hook that, thankfully, gives way to a fairly standard tambourine-driven pop song. The song seems hopeful at first—the story of a Girl cheerfully awaiting the return of her soldier boyfriend. Perhaps in one of the few links to the Shangri-Las’s other songs, the girl seems almost relieved at the prospect of being separated by such a noble cause. “Something’s come between us,” Weiss sings, “and it’s not another girl.” This is not the first time that we can detect this response to tragedy. It’s pathological, almost a form of Munchausen-by-proxy. The Girl is a cut above petty school-day drama: she is confronting the larger forces of war and mortality. But when the refrain of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” returns, the song seems to pivot on its axis. While the 72

SHA N G R I - L A , O R T OM O R R OW ’ S A L O N G WAY O F F

Gansers chant in the background, Weiss’s voice rises above the mix: “Please Lord. Don’t let anything happen to him, please,” she says. “I’m waiting for you, Johnny, I’m waiting.” Weiss’s delivery here is more like the languid tone of “Past, Present and Future,” or the spoken parts of “I Can Never Go Home Anymore.” It’s a crack in the cheery façade that casts a shadow on the whole song. What if Johnny doesn’t come back? How could he return unscathed when the Guy of the Shangri-Las is eternally doomed? When the worst so often happens? When the Vietnam War tore apart a generation? I had never doubted the optimism of the song before, and I chalk it up now to my immersion in the subtle fatalism of the Shangri-Las, which makes every happy moment suspect. “Long Live Our Love” is an example of something that the Shangri-Las actually rarely do; it’s what I like to call a “wishin’ and hopin’” song, a term borrowed from the Burt Bacharach/ Dusty Springfield hit. “Wishin’ and hopin’” is otherwise ubiquitous in girl-group songs. It’s an impatient optimism, the desire to be grown up already. The clichéd image of a girl painted unskillfully with makeup, tottering around clumsily in high heels—something about the liminality of adolescence seems to provoke a certain antsiness for the future. And it’s especially a trope of girl-group songs to be here, but want to be there; I think of The Chiffons’s “One Fine Day” or “Maybe” by the Chantels, songs about yearning for something to happen. Countless girl-group songs are full of this breathless optimism for the future, ranging from “deliver ‘da letter, ‘da sooner ‘da better” (“Mr. Postman”) to “sooner or later, I hope it’s not later” (“He’s So Fine”), with the expectations almost always centering around a man. In 73

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

this way, these songs reinforce the idea that snagging a man is the inevitable purpose and outcome of a young girl’s life, the best way to secure her future—if not as independent, at least as stable. One of the things that is most puzzling about Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las is the complete absence of this narrative— instead of hope and optimism for the future, the songs impart a feeling of dread and pessimism about growing up. In Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell,” he sings of “a teenage wedding,” where “the old folks wished them well.” Songs like this exemplify the precociousness of an era that also saw the release of “Chapel of Love.” These were songs not just about “wishin’ and hopin’,” but about actually trying to accelerate into adult life. Meanwhile, in the world of the Shangri-Las, the only kind of acceleration accomplished by a teenage wedding is off a cliff. The “Wishin’ and Hopin’’ song is fundamentally fixated on a mutable future, a future of endless possibilities. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Shangri-Las are fundamentally fatalistic. We are fatalistic too, when we listen to them. By “Long Live Our Love,” we have learned their lexicon, we know how the future tends to play out in this dark plane of adolescence. This feeling of immutability, that everything has already been said and done, functions on a grammatical level for the Shangri-Las. They rarely deal with subjunctives, which “express a wish, command, exhortation, or a contingent, hypothetical, or prospective event.”3 When they do, it’s a departure; “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” exists in both the present tense (the call and response conversation between a girl and her friends) and the future, where the girl 74

SHA N G R I - L A , O R T OM O R R OW ’ S A L O N G WAY O F F

imagines kissing her boyfriend. “What is Love,” in which the Girl predicts a world that is “bright and happy, for the rest of time,” operates in similar way. But the tragic songs reside mostly in the past, and the Girl often refuses to speculate about the future. “Tomorrow? Well, tomorrow’s a long way off ” deadpans Weiss in “Past, Present and Future,” refusing to indulge in the creation of a changeable fantasy. Ultimately, what’s so strange about the jaded Girl of the Shangri-Las, is that she has already experienced more in her adolescence than the wistful Girl of the Chantels’s “Maybe,” who is still waiting for her life to begin. The Girl of the Shangri-Las, in contrast, often seems to feel like her life is already over. “Whatever happened to the life I gave to you,” Mary Weiss sings in “Remember (Walkin in the Sand),” “What will I do with it now?” There’s something that seems subversive about this—naiveté, so common in girl-group songs, is cast away as an outdated model. She’s been that naive girl, but she’s learned from her mistakes now. The majority of songs on Golden Hits are tragedies centering around one theme—not love, despite what you might first think—but rather, they center around growing up, the transition out of adolescence into adulthood. “Past, Present and Future” is the clearest example of this; Weiss’s recitation of the nursery rhyme is almost too heavy-handed in its insistence of childhood gone by, the mention of “broken toys” a maladroit set-up of the song’s loss-of-innocence narrative. This schematic, though not so explicitly, is echoed throughout the album, often resulting in what feels like a temporal disconnect, the feeling that the past does not feed continuously into the present—or future. That the shift 75

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

into the adult world is at best, jarring, at worst, completely untenable. That something is compromised along the way. To understand the group’s odd and fatalistic obsession with time and the future, we can again zero in on language, beginning with the group’s very name. The name ShangriLas sounds somewhat peculiar as it stands apart from the traditional feminine suffixes we find in many girl-group names: all those “ettes” and “elles.” It’s not particularly cutesy, either, like The Cookies or The Blossoms. It does have an element of punniness, with the “Las” component working double-time to tie the name back to the vowels of the backing vocals. But in 1965, the Shangri-Las could have just as easily been the name of a psychedelic rock band, maybe some lesserknown contemporary of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. It seems to have more esoteric aspirations, a seemingly deliberate departure from the humdrum world of wholesome nomenclature. Just like the Shangri-Las themselves, their name somehow manages to be both playful and cryptic. The story goes that the name “the Shangri-Las” was lifted from a local Chinese restaurant in the girls’ native borough of Queens, New York. There’s very little reason to doubt this; that’s the sort of devil-may-care, flippant, decidedly uncultivated choice you might expect from a group of teenagers. But even fifty years later, Shangri-La, the fictional location from which that Chinese restaurant presumably drew its name, has a set of vague associations for most people—a location of serenity, eternal youth, utopia. The name comes directly from a novel by James Hilton, called Lost Horizon. Though a best-seller in 1933, Hilton’s novel isn’t particularly widely read today, even though 76

SHA N G R I - L A , O R T OM O R R OW ’ S A L O N G WAY O F F

our associations with the name “Shangri-La” stem almost entirely from it. The connection of Shangri-La to eternal youth is one borne straight out of Lost Horizon, although by now it is often a paraphrased connection, lacking some of the cynicism and complication actually present in Hilton’s book. At the cat shelter in my neighborhood, there is a room for older and infirm cats called “Shangri-La.” Shangri-La, in this case, seems like it hints either at an artificially prolonged life of suffering or at the looming release of death. It’s pretty depressing, but it seems like one of the more astute references to Hilton’s original Shangri-La. Lost Horizon tells the story of four passengers on a hijacked plane who find themselves stranded in the mountains of Tibet, at a mysterious lamasery called “Shangri-La.” Like many fictional utopias, it’s not as perfect as it’s cracked up to be; the idyllic nature of Shangri-La is an odd one, appealing most particularly to the story’s hero, Conway, whose manuscript is the basis of the story’s frame narrative. Conway is a British consul, whose experiences in the First World War render him jaded and lethargic, though not unlikeable. Though all but one of the passengers eventually succumbs to the charms of Shangri-La, Conway is the first to give up any hope of escape, and thus the first to unlock the secrets of the monastery’s serene way of life. Through means not explicitly revealed to us, the inhabitants of Shangri-La and its accompanying valley are able to achieve extraordinary longevity, though not invincibility, while living within the valley’s borders; Conway is told this by the high lama, who himself is several hundred years old. The theocratic rule of Shangri-La centers around an idea of “moderation” that is emphasized in all 77

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

things, moderation in devoutness, in truthfulness, even in “moderation itself.” The society is peaceful, even listless. As the high lama tells Conway, There is, I admit, an odd quality in you that I have never met in any of our visitors hitherto. It is not quite cynicism, still less bitterness; perhaps it is partly disillusionment, but it is a clarity of mind that I should not have expected in any one younger than—say, a century or so. It is, if I had to put a single word to it, passionlessness.4 It is the absence of passion that seems the reigning doctrine in Shangri-La, and the best predictor of success within its serenity. This is why, as the high lama finds himself at the end of his very long life, he selects Conway to be his successor and take over the rule of Shangri-La. While Buddhism (which places central within its doctrine the belief that all desire is suffering) is certainly the tenuous inspiration for the deliberately passionless environment of Shangri-La, Conway’s beliefs often veer toward nihilism. More than anything, Conway is a damning image of the lost generation; he is entrusted with Shangri-La to keep it safe from outside influence, from what the high lama feels to be an impending global crisis. It is not the influence of society that Shangri-La fears—they welcome the influence of culture and philosophy and seek out new inhabitants with these contributions in mind. The aloofness of Shangri-La, rather, is a response to the threat of world war, and imperialist exploitation. Of the four passengers on the plane, only one remains bitterly resistant to the idea of Shangri-La. Mallinson is another British consul, though much younger than Conway. 78

SHA N G R I - L A , O R T OM O R R OW ’ S A L O N G WAY O F F

Where Conway is absent of passion and desire, Mallinson is ruled by it. This is why he’s an imperfect fit in Shangri-La and why it’s so fitting that his ultimate escape from Shangri-La is spurred by love. Though we know that Conway escapes, Hilton never quite reveals to us whether Mallinson and LoTsen, the beautiful, seemingly young girl who lives in the monastery, are able to get out too. All we know is that after the escape, Mallinson’s whereabouts are unknown, suggesting the worst for his attempted escape. Conway, meanwhile, is found in China, with an old woman—suggesting that outside the walls of Shangri-La, the seemingly young Lo-Tsen has physically accelerated into her real age. These Englishmen in Lost Horizon represent two varying responses to the bleak idealism of Shangri-La’s infinity. Though Mallinson does not yet know the secrets of the monastery at the time of his escape or have any real reason to fear them, the mere idea of infinity alarms him, even if the imprisonment is gentle. He chooses to face an uncertain journey, and his possible death, rather than remain. Conway, on the other hand, resigns himself to whatever fate he is dealt: To be candid, your sketch of the future interests me only in an abstract sense. I can’t look so far ahead. I should certainly be sorry if I had to leave Shangri-La to-morrow or next week, or even next year; but how I shall feel about it if I live to be a hundred isn’t a matter to prophesy. I can face it, like any other future, but in order to make me keen it must have a point. I’ve sometimes doubted whether life itself has any; and if not, long life must be even more pointless.5

79

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

The connection of the Shangri-Las to Hilton’s Shangri-La is a metempsychotic one; the two entities operate by means of similar impulses and ideas, though through very different channels. Who knows if the Shangri-Las ever read Lost Horizon or even knew what it was about—it’s not outside of the realm of possibility, I suppose, but the connection certainly cannot be called causal. But what is ultimately important to us is that Lost Horizon has at its core a fear, a preoccupation, that should by now be familiar to us: there is no future in this world. Conway and Mallinson form one character, a composite of two men at different points on the age and time spectrum; Conway, the older man who has seen war and lost his innocence and Mallinson, the young man who holds fast to his ideals, uncompromising and reckless. This is an archetype we see in Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las; Weiss’s delivery is a balancing act between the voice of the Girl and of the Woman, two characters who show up in the songs with surprising regularity. Weiss, as the lead singer on all but one of the songs on Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las, bears the burden of embodying the Girl at all times. Though she herself is not the author of the songs, her voice is so distinctive, so idiosyncratic, that the songs on the album begin to overlap in the listener’s mind as a continuous narrative, as though they are really about one Girl. Girl-groups occasionally chase this sort of narrative consistency. Think of the Marvelettes followup hit to “Mr. Postman” called “Twistin’ Postman” which is a celebratory ode to the postman who finally delivered “da letter,” or Leslie Gore’s “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” a sequel to “It’s My Party.” But the consistency of the Shangri-Las is not 80

SHA N G R I - L A , O R T OM O R R OW ’ S A L O N G WAY O F F

purely for the sake of novelty, although they are often charged with being too set in their style to really transcend that very label. It’s almost impossible not to listen to Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las as a cycle of reincarnation—some plane of the Twilight Zone, where the Girl cannot help but get into the same sort of trouble over and over again. Though The Girl of the Shangri-Las refuses to wish and hope, to enter into speculation or play the what-if game, the songs, in fact, do it for her, playing out variations of different scenarios like a choose-your-own-adventure book. The Shangri-Las’s tackle the issue of growing up, their essential tragic motif, as if they’re two competing mathematicians working on a theorem. Songs like “Past, Present and Future” and “Remember (Walkin in the Sand)” typify the loss-ofinnocence narrative in which the transition to adulthood proves traumatic and debilitating to the Girl, leaving her jaded and pessimistic about her prospects in life. But perhaps it’s time to take off the kid gloves and address option B, best shown in “Leader of the Pack” and “Give Us Your Blessings.” In these songs, death acts as a morbid alternative, a way to stay an adolescent forever. We’ve already talked about the erotic significance of death in Golden Hits, and its power to destabilize the male presence. But death is also able to destabilize the adult world at large; it’s a morbid means of preserving innocence from the necessary concessions and sacrifices of postadolescent life. These two alternatives create parallels throughout the album, moments when alternative universes seem to play out different outcomes from the same scenario. “Leader of the Pack” and “Out in the Streets” are excellent examples of this 81

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

phenomenon given the thematic as well as musical parallels they offer. There’s a part in “Leader of the Pack” that previews eerier songs to come—around the 2:27 mark, the boy’s revving engine gives way to an unearthly wail. It’s difficult to pick out at first where the noise is coming from—it’s so pure and hidden in the mix at first that it sounds inexplicably like a bagpipe. As the dust settles, we can identify it as the oohing of the backing vocals. But even once we recognize what’s making the sound, the moment remains wholly uncanny. When that sound repeats almost exactly at the beginning of “Out in the Streets,” we should take it as our first clue that these songs are linked. In a sense, “Out in the Street” is the ultimate what-if. It’s the reprisal of the bad-boy biker character, except he is finally domesticated, adapted to suit the conventional demands of the world. The song creates an alternate universe to that of “Leader of the Pack” in which we never find out if The Girl and The Boy make it out there in the adult world. It’s an alternate universe in which the girl defies her father and stays with her boyfriend. It’s an alternate universe even to The “good-bad, not evil” Boy of “Give Him a Great Big Kiss.” In “Out in the Streets,” we learn that The Boy “Used to act bad, used to, but he quit.” The price for giving up his teenage rebellion? “Something died,” sings Weiss. Perhaps second only to “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” which has the unfair advantage of tugging on the mother-daughter heartstrings, “Out in the Streets” is one of the most truly heartbreaking songs on the album, it bristles with a genuine intensity that “Leader of the Pack,” for all of its merits, never achieves. The Girl, who seems perpetually forced into 82

SHA N G R I - L A , O R T OM O R R OW ’ S A L O N G WAY O F F

squareness by her family and the world at large, cannot hold onto her wild and adventurous youth. She must set it—and its emblem, The Boy—free. Though he doesn’t die in a fiery crash, The Girl’s relinquishment of The Boy is a death of its own. At almost the exact same moment in “Out in the Streets” (at 2:25 as opposed to the 2:27 mark in “Leader of the Pack”) we hear the return of that clear wail, funereal, dirgelike. It marks the death of the child and the birth of the adult. The antecedent of this loss-of-innocence narrative can be traced all the way back to poets such as William Blake whose collection Songs of Innocence and Experience coincides temporally with the growing awareness of childhood as a state of individual consciousness. Just like the teenager, a concept less than a century old, the notion of childhood as a distinct state did not exist until the eighteenth century. As Linda Austin writes, the idea of children as “autonomous beings rather than mere extensions of a patriarchal family” developed in tandem with a Romantic notion of nostalgia. Childhood, and the accompanying belief in its inherent sacredness, was defined by adult longing for it. Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote of childhood in a hazy, wistful way, according to Austin: In early poems like “We are Seven,” and “Lucy Gray,” he portrayed the essential autonomy of an innocent or mythic child whose lineage stretched back to Pelagius. (FN3) Yet this child of nature became in Wordsworth’s translation a retrospective phenomenon, one from whom the subject felt sadly distant. The “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” in which the poet speaks directly about

83

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

longing for a lost childhood, and “Lucy Gray,” in which the figure of childhood disappears, both convey the wonder and desire adults invested in trying to remember their past, unsocialized selves.6 The notion of the child thus arises out of the belief of lost innocence; it is a state that the world prevents from lasting infinitely. Through corruption, the adult is born. Perhaps most useful for our purposes, Austin suggests that childhood was not necessarily defined by age itself in the early development of “childhood” as a notion. Childhood and its end were relative and subject to specific and personal circumstances. In a retrospective narrative, often a traumatic familial event such as the loss of a parent, a move, or a pronounced change in the organization of the family identifies childhood by its close. In Mary and Charles Lamb’s Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809), the storytellers are all prepubescent, but each girl defines her childhood as a period of her past in which a younger, less competent self coped with sudden change and dislocation.7 This seems to speak to the precociousness of the adult perspective in the Shangri-Las, which finds a sixteen-yearold Mary Weiss singing of the past with the nostalgia you might expect from a much older woman. For the teenager of the 1960s, we certainly see adolescence defined by some common elements: school, the family, home. But just as there were uncertainties in early definitions of childhood, so too for the teen in the early 1960s. For the Girl and Boy of the

84

SHA N G R I - L A , O R T OM O R R OW ’ S A L O N G WAY O F F

Shangri-Las, truant, runaways, no longer welcome in the family home, childhood is terminated early. Granted, the conditions of middle-class adolescence are not quite comparable to childhood during the industrial revolution, evidenced by Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper”: When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry “Weep! weep! weep! weep!” So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.8 But as Mary Weiss said in an interview for New York Magazine, “My father died right after I was born, and my mother didn’t do much of anything.” “I had a fairly rotten childhood. Lived in abject poverty. Always fended for myself. I didn’t really have a childhood; I was supporting myself from the time I was 14.”9 It makes a world of sense to consider that for the Shangri-Las, all under twenty at the time of their disbanding, adult life came crashing down on Mary Weiss and Marge and Mary Ann Ganser, forcibly bringing their childhood to a close. With this in mind, the jaded voice of the Girl seems a little more justified, and less hyperbolic. The Shangri-Las were certainly unsuited for “Wishin’ and Hopin’” given their individual notions of adolescence and adulthood, but their darker sensibility also speaks to a larger trepidation present in early 1960s’ American society as atomic panic filtered into everyday life and culture. Girlgroup music is often accused of having its collective head in the sand, of being utterly reactionary. The charge of vapidity is unsurprising in a medium fronted by teenage girls who are rarely given the benefit of the doubt. Where the music 85

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

is seen to be influenced by the larger culture, critics mostly note its adherence to hegemonic gender stereotypes. But if I have imparted anything to the reader, I hope I’ve shown that such charges are often overly simplistic, themselves rooted in that very same hegemonic values. The Shangri-Las may not be overtly political but that is not to say they aren’t conspicuously informed by the politics of their time. Just as Lost Horizon is haunted by the threat of prolonged global conflict, which effects a cynicism and ambivalence about the future, we can trace a similar nihilism and dread in the music of the Shangri-Las to a comparable circumstance, the total and blinding nuclear paranoia of early 1960s’ America. As Oline Eaton quotes from the propaganda film, Duck and Cover, “Tony knows the bomb can explode any time of the year. Day or night, he is ready for it. . . . Sundays, holidays, vacation time, we must be ready every day, all the time, to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes.” The darkly comic documentary The Atomic Café (1982) poked ironic fun at such films, but they appear less ridiculous when we remember that the threat was felt to be real and that this particular film was directed at children. “Older people will help us, as they always do,” the narrator of Duck and Cover reminded young viewers, “but there might not be any grown-ups around when the bomb explodes. Then, you’re on your own.”10 The world of the Shangri-Las is a world without grown-ups— when they’re present, they don’t understand anyway. They don’t understand the plight of the thrill-seeking teenager, who 86

SHA N G R I - L A , O R T OM O R R OW ’ S A L O N G WAY O F F

is inheriting the world of the atomic bomb. Their world feels less than stable, so why invest in the future? Eaton’s excerpt from Duck and Cover seems to suggest that the Shangri-Las weren’t the only ones waking up in—and responding to—a world where the adults are no longer omnipotent. In a Guardian article entitled “Pop in the Age of the Atomic Bomb,” Jon Savage (author of England’s Dreaming) links the rise of groups like the Beatles to that very same threat which created a generation ready to hedonistically consume pop culture. The profound effect of the bomb on teenagers was examined by Jeff Nuttall in Bomb Culture, his 1968 survey of postwar youth culture: “No longer could teacher, magistrate, politician, don or even loving parent guide the young. Their membership in the H-bomb society automatically cancelled anything they might have to say on questions of right or wrong.” In his view, “the so-called ‘generation gap’ started then” and had been widening ever since: “The people who had passed puberty at the time of the bomb found that they were incapable of conceiving of life without a future,” he wrote. “The people who had not yet reached puberty at the time of the bomb were incapable of conceiving of life with a future.”11 It’s no coincidence that Savage’s magnum opus England’s Dreaming centers around the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten’s cry of “No future” in the group’s most infamous song “God Save the Queen” is like a steroid-enhanced version of the nihilism found in the atomic-influenced pop of the 1950s and the 1960s. “They made you a moron,” Rotten charges of 87

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

the Queen’s England, “a potential H Bomb.” “God Save the Queen” is the ultimate song of generational disconnect— its title itself ousts England’s national anthem and replaces it with something intentionally foul and blasphemous, a Petrine cross in the face of high tea. Rotten’s motivations are clear, and thanks to the freedom of punk he minces no words. “There’s no future,” he sings, “and England’s Dreaming.” A girl-group may seem like an unconventional choice for this line of inheritance which Savage connects to Elvis, the Beatles and the Sex Pistols. Savage’s article mostly shuns the pop end of the spectrum and only makes brief mention of one female artist, rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson and her song “Fujiyama Mama.” But unlikely as the connection may seem and as uncanonical as they are, the Shangri-Las represent the farthest reaches of this atomic panic. They embody its unease and foreboding without the flip novelty of songs like “Atom Bomb Baby.” While the Sex Pistols may go right out and say it, the Shangri-Las instead use the ultimate narrative tool to show us that there’s no future, and all that “wishin’ and hopin’” is just so much naive dreaming. As Lost Horizon relies heavily on notions of innocence and experience to convey the repercussions of war on the individual, so too does Golden Hits use the loss-of-innocence narrative as a means of actually disavowing a hopeless future. The ShangriLas approach nihilism against the overwhelming pressure of all of the “wishin’ and hopin’” producing inane hits like Peggy March’s “I Wish I Were a Princess.” Even in March’s fantasy of power and agency, her primary objective is the landing of a “prince” so the two of them can “live happily ever after as in days of old.” Songs like March’s ignore the dread by instead 88

SHA N G R I - L A , O R T OM O R R OW ’ S A L O N G WAY O F F

promoting powdered sugar fantasies. The Girl as Princess keeps her sights on a rosy future in hopes that the world will steady itself in time as if a return to some past idyll is still possible. The Shangri-Las, however, remain unconvinced. As Mary Weiss sings at the very conclusion of “Past, Present, and Future,” “I don’t think it will ever happen again.”

89

90

Does This Sound Familiar?

Like the doomed characters in their songs, the Shangri-Las have remained forever young in the public imagination, perpetual teenagers whose public personas lived and died with their music’s heyday. In some improbable way, one that was certainly unfathomable to the Shangri-Las at the time, their music lived on to find a place in the future. But in 1966, it didn’t even seem as though they could make it another year—“Past, Present and Future,” with its meager chart ranking of fifty-nine, seemed to mark the beginning of the end for the group. None of their subsequent releases would reach the heights of “Remember” and “Leader of the Pack” or remain as beloved as B sides like “Heaven Only Knows” and “Train from Kansas City.” At this point Mary Weiss and the Ganser twins were still only eighteen. Other than a short-lived reunion in the mid-1970s, the Shangri-Las never made any serious attempt at reforming. Neither Mary nor any of the group’s remaining members attempted solo careers until Weiss’s 2007 album. Maybe, as Weiss suggests, the legal turmoil really did lock the girls out of the music world for what seemed like good. But it also feels near impossible to picture the Shangri-Las continuing

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

past their peak. Their sound is a precise alloy of youth and angst, fantasy and tragedy, a fact often leveraged against them as proof of their gimmicky appeal. Alternately, their demise seems the ultimate show of commitment to their “live fast, die young” credo. Their dissolution might seem an act of prescience, their ability to foresee and therefore avoid the inevitable decline—into musical flops, schlocky songs, whatever cruel hand fate deals to pop groups that hang on too long. Perhaps in this final act the Shangri-Las proved themselves to be method-actors who gave their melodrama the final push it needed. Once again, I call to mind James Dean, who himself acted in only three movies during his brief career. In the public imagination, Dean’s untimely death became his fourth and final role, the one, incidentally, he would best be remembered for. In a similar fashion, the Shangri-Las were given a final chance to cement their image—and they took it. But did they? The answer lies somewhere between yes and no. For the Shangri-Las as a group death was symbolic but it was certainly decisive. They were not coming back. But yet again life seems to mimic art; if the Shangri-Las teach us anything through their music, it’s the value of rumor and hearsay, the power of a good story to live on after its subjects are gone. The Shangri-Las are peddlers of urban legends, stories designed to live on as myth, always morphing, adapting and regenerating anew. In their songs, we are taught never to rely on the recognition of adults or the cultural authority of the “straight” world, but rather on the more excitable, less truth-obsessed solipsism of the teen world. If you can’t be understood, well, at least you can be talked about. The 92

D O E S T H I S S O U N D FA M I L IA R ?

Shangri-Las’s currency, then, is repetition and retelling. This credo is essential when considering the legacy of the ShangriLas because it is through this currency, undervalued though it may be, that the group has managed to retain a small place in the present. Situating the lore of the Shangri-Las as akin to urban legend is useful as a point of context for the peculiar way that the group has lived on throughout the years. They have maintained an unfaltering level of indie credibility while receiving little or no critical recognition. They are often disparaged by girl-group aficionados, like Warwick, but hold a special place in the hearts of rock ’n’ roll groups. Why, then, are the Shangri-Las such rock ’n’ roll darlings? My hunch that the Shangri-Las are in some way a proto-punk (or at least rock ’n’ roll) group is necessarily informed by the fact that rather than adhering to Brill Building standards of collaboration and joint production, the group behaved in some ways more like a rock band. The typical narrative of the pop group, and especially the girl-group, is one of assemblage, a group united under the vision of a producer. However, even before Morton brought them into the studio to record “Remember,” the Shangri-Las already were the Shangri-Las. Morton’s relationship to the Shangri-Las seems in its essence symbiotic; the two needed one another to accomplish their goal. In this way, I believe Morton was less a Phil Spector and more like George Martin, the “fifth Beatle.” We prize in rock ’n’ roll its auteur character; to grant this honorary label to an outside genre, we look for a similar streak of independence and self-reliance. The Shangri-Las were, and continue to be, unique in their identity as a group. Though their line-up shifted 93

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

microscopically throughout the years, these changes were almost imperceptible to the listener. Mary Weiss always sang lead, at least on the big songs. The twins’ identical presentation rendered them interchangeable, able to be conflated into one member for the sake of continuity. Betty was an inconstant member, but she was family, making her able to be warmly reintroduced when she wished or when she was needed. The songs of the Shangri-Las are extremely character-driven, rather than generalized, accounts of adolescence, which in turn makes the group one defined by clear personalities. Not a group put together piecemeal but a group that emerged in a more organic, inspired way. The Shangri-Las were not polished to unrecognizable perfection; their rough edges— vocals quirks, awkward performances—remained always on view. They were not perfect, idealized girls. They were girls you might know. Those, of course, are not the only reasons that the Shangri-Las have found such a home in rock ’n’ roll, not even close. Their individuality, however, is an important component. The group’s attitude and demeanor is alluded to just as often as their songs. In fact, the two highest profile musical references to the Shangri-Las (excluding, of course, Aerosmith’s 1979 cover of “Remember”) aren’t even covers— both “New Rose” (the Damned) and “Looking For a Kiss” (the New York Dolls) are more like quotations, oblique hints at the Shangri-Las through the spoken asides they were known for. The opening lines of the Dolls’s “Looking For a Kiss,” which quote Mary Weiss’s spoken refrain at the start of “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” are so iconic, so completely owned by David Johansen’s spitting snarl, that one could 94

D O E S T H I S S O U N D FA M I L IA R ?

easily be forgiven for taking them as his own. In all fairness, Johansen may have as much claim to that iconic “L-U-V” as the Shangri-Las do. The phrase in each case is structurally integral to the song as a whole. Johansen, in fact, plays it relatively straight—his attitude-laden delivery is no more bombastic than Weiss’s original, devoid of mockery or even innuendo. Johansen’s reference is central to the song, but he does not call attention to its status as quotation. Instead, he appropriates it confidently, perhaps with the assurance that those who get it will get it. “New Rose” with its quiet start—“Is she really going out with him?”—is a reference of a different color. Where the flamboyancy of the New York Dolls allows for a bit of spoken ridiculousness and Johansen’s raucous New York accent cushions the transition of the line from Weiss’s mouth to his own, the Damned take “Leader of the Pack’s” definitive line as something more particular. Dave Vanian’s flat, affected American intonation is full of girlish imitation, completely unafraid of posturing. This line is also essential to ‘New Rose’ but unlike David Johansen’s open-armed embrace of the quotation, Vanian keeps his at arms-length, without incorporating it into the song as a whole. While Johansen follows Weiss’s cadence and timing, offering the quotation as a structurally appropriate way of leading into the Dolls’s own song, “New Rose” rushes into the opening line of “Leader of the Pack” with urgency, skipping the musical beat that precedes it in the original. The question that Vanian imitates seems less a true invocation of the Shangri-Las than a general reference to the “girls-calling-girls” trope of 1960s pop. In Vanian’s summoning of the Shangri-Las in “New Rose,” theirs 95

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

is an influence to be acknowledged and left bare, remaining familiar and yet alien to the song. Neither reference is hidden; both groups wear this influence on their sleeves for those “in the know” to appreciate. Yet while they don’t attempt to hide these allusions, their homage is subtle. This private love for the Shangri-Las, the desire to humbly emulate rather than extol them from the rooftops, is important. The Shangri-Las were taken in by their kind— the rebellious, the uncouth, the unapologetic. But rock ’n’ roll isn’t always interested in truth or record keeping. rock ’n’ roll relies on myth, something slippery that can keep giving longer than truth can, something infinitely more useful to the creative mind. The Shangri-Las will probably never have their true moment in the sun but they will remain for some time in the unofficial lexicon of rock ’n’ roll. Comparing “New Rose” and “Looking for a Kiss” inevitably yields a larger topic. Both songs employ an unavoidable dose of irony, a quality that cannot be helped under the circumstances. It’s a difficult feat, emulating the mind and performance of a teenage girl and, as I’ve already suggested, the Shangri-Las were singular in their ability to pull it off in the first place. Devin McKinney’s defense of “Past, Present and Future,” so generous to a song I had long written off, is decidedly less so to Alex Chilton’s version which McKinney describes as an overdose of irony. In a 1970s’ bootleg, Box Tops/Big Star singer Chilton murders his way through the song (according to McKinney). Chilton’s own apathy pairs with that of an unbelieving audience as he “squirms with self-consciousness, yet … hangs onto feeling, just barely. Primed for disaster, the performance could still go either 96

D O E S T H I S S O U N D FA M I L IA R ?

way—forward into transformative drama, or backward into smug, self-consuming irony.”1 And, boy, does he pedal backward, hard. My own take on Alex Chilton’s version of “Past, Present and Future” is less draconian than McKinney’s. I was pleasantly surprised to find it no more drenched in irony than anything else in Chilton’s solo repertoire—think of the idiot-savant voice of “Bangkok” or even the playful covers on his 1970 Free Again sessions. There’s an inherent dry hilarity to his cover of “Jumpin Jack Flash.” It seems like such an uncool song to cover but Chilton’s take on the classic Rolling Stones single somehow manages to roughen it up, bring out its brutal blues energy. One of the other notable covers on Free Again is the singer’s version of “Sugar, Sugar,” the 1969 hit by the animated band the Archies. It’s a snide, snot-nosed rendition, and you can almost feel Chilton laughing all the way through the nearly seven-minute take. It’s brilliant though, hard-edged and sloppy, a boon to the song’s perfect pop structure. Chilton demonstrates a professed love for pop that while tinged with irony, doesn’t rely on the luxury of nostalgia for its justification. Chilton’s reference to the Archies is even more egalitarian—it’s easy to look back on the pop of yesterday through rose-tinted glasses, quite another thing to actually acknowledge and elevate the pop of your contemporaries. It’s hard to believe that Chilton, whose solo music is such a play of pastiche and humor, doesn’t have a great deal of love for his sources at whatever depth it resides beneath his dry and sarcastic façade. McKinney juxtaposes Chilton’s rendition of “Past, Present and Future” with what he deems a more successful Shangri97

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

Las rendition, Neko Case’s undeniably strong cover of “The Train from Kansas City” from her 2004 live album The Tigers Have Spoken. It’s an undoubtedly great take on a great song. Mary Weiss’s vocals are idiosyncratic, even imperfect, but they are never weak. Neko Case, for her part, uses her powerful singing voice to remain faithful to Weiss’s own fullthroated delivery. Case’s cover is faster than the original and the chugging of the original piano (a motif set-up by the train whistle at the beginning of the song and continued through the piano) is translated to guitar, making the imagined motion of the train feel harder and more mechanical. But overall, it is pretty true to the original—if anything, it tones down the drama of the Shangri-Las version. McKinney does not claim that the song is devoid of irony, but he too observes the decisiveness of Case’s cover: it’s quick, powerful, with very little room for doubt or ponderousness. As for her approach toward irony, McKinney writes that Case “uses it not as nostalgia or parody, but as a way of asking how the emotional signifiers of the pop past—those olden, golden days before irony was perceived as a tool at all—can still be made to work today, when it sometimes seems that irony is the only tool we have.”2 McKinney shows that Case’s irony is a productive kind; her cover takes the high road while Chilton’s version lacks earnest faith in the original and makes his irony sound too much like ridicule. We can certainly agree that Case’s rendition was never meant as parody, but I would go as far as to allow the same generosity toward Alex Chilton, who, after all, had a much harder song to work with. To understand how difficult it is to compare these two versions of two very different songs, 98

D O E S T H I S S O U N D FA M I L IA R ?

we might do best to compare the originals. Comparing “The Train from Kansas City” with “Past, Present and Future” is like trying to compare Twelfth Night with Hamlet. “The Train from Kansas City,” though dealing with jilted lovers and past romances, is essentially a light-hearted song. It’s a personal favorite of mine, but I’ll readily admit that it’s one of the more bubblegum songs on Golden Hits with a very recognizable pop structure that would be hard to screw up. Cover versions rarely do screw it up; Shop Assistants have an ethereal rendition that, while somewhat wispier than the original, nicely updates the girl-group format into another often girl-driven genre, indie pop. I prefer Superchunk’s version, perhaps even to Neko Case’s, because of its animal energy. It feels appropriately noisy while Shop Assistants minimize the sound of the chugging train. They focus more on the vocal melody and the beat of the tambourine while Superchunk emphasizes the effect of the train with heavy, distorted guitar. In a way, Superchunk seems to seize upon the most Shangri-Las thing about the song, not just the catchy melody, or the way it tells a story. Superchunk instead finds the brashness in “Train from Kansas City” by zeroing in on the song’s kitschiest, most idiosyncratic feature: the use of sound effects to create an aural environment. McKinney claims that the Shangri-Las belong to a pop past devoid of irony, but I’m not sure that’s the right category for them, a group that seems to spurn the halcyon at every turn. The Shangri-Las are not innocent of irony. They use it as a tool in their music so it’s not exactly surprising that irony would become a feature for musicians approaching their music now. If Chilton’s cover of “Past, Present and 99

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

Future” has an element of parody, or even meanness, it may be because he, like Superchunk, recognizes an element of the ridiculous in the song and chooses to emphasize rather than gloss over it. Even as someone who takes the Shangri-Las very seriously, I want to ask if we have to take every aspect of them as serious? In what seems like yet more proof of the Shangri-Las’s fringe status, the group makes it into Iain Ellis’s book Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists, in which Ellis catalogs the role of humor as an underrated but influential agent of rock ’n’ roll. Ellis’s inclusion of the Shangri-Las in a book about subversive humor suggests what I too believe: that the melodrama of the Shangri-Las is sincere, but not, as McKinney suggests, devoid of operational irony. By speaking directly to the silent girl demographic—about them, through their voices—an alternative aesthetic was produced that set itself in ironic inverse to conventions. With the Shangri-Las, the irony penetrated a second plane, for besides being on one of the leading lights of girl group music, they also set themselves in comic contrast to the conventions of their own subgenre.3 Ellis succinctly puts into words what I have grappled with in my study of the Shangri-Las—they are inherently within and without—both ingrained in the milieu of the girlgroups, and intensely different from that selfsame genre. If Ellis is to be believed, though, perhaps the Shangri-Las defy categorization because we do not consider them ironic or grant their potential status as humorists. I do not mean that the Shangri-Las intend their music as a joke, although there 100

D O E S T H I S S O U N D FA M I L IA R ?

is some evidence to suggest that songwriter Jeff Barry, and even Shadow Morton, did on occasion see things that way. As I have already mentioned, I think that we continuously deny the Shangri-Las their due because of our unwillingness to appreciate their melodrama and camp for what it is; we continue to compare their records to what is derisively labeled as inane “bubble gum” or as self-serious girl-group songs of the Phil Spector ilk when the music of the ShangriLas is neither. I’ve suggested how this melodrama actively functions in the music, but perhaps Ellis is correct to allow that our modern interpretation of the Shangri-Las should admit moments of humor. This possibility is, in many ways, quite hard to concede. Part of the difficulty stems from a hierarchy that defines humor, like melodrama, as a lower form of entertainment. In conceding that some aspects of the Shangri-Las might stand as humor, there is a fear that we have given up the whole game, that we are allowing the world of Rockism to say Ha! We told you no one should take girl-groups seriously! As Ellis writes, himself parodying an incredulous response to girlgroups: “Subversive? No Way! Humorists? Maybe if you are laughing at them!”4 True enough: by depicting the ShangriLas as humorists, we can easily see how they might slip into the realm of being simply humorous—victims of irony rather than instigators of it. And why is this? Maybe it’s because of their lowly status as teenage girls, a demographic supposedly void of agency or free thought. Maybe it’s another by-product of the “Svengali” narrative, which casts the singers as mere pawns to be manipulated by a scheming producer. If their songwriters and producers knowingly created parody or 101

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

camp, then perhaps that creation stands as a taunting gesture to the girls who enacted it. But, again, to think that way is to place too great an emphasis on self-seriousness, on realism, when the world of teenage fantasy is surreal by nature. As most of us will remember, teendom is a landscape that is both tragic and silly. This is perhaps the key to understanding why so many songs that cover or reference the Shangri-Las do so with an undeniable element of tongue-in-cheek humor. Perhaps we make our primary error in assuming that this correlation operates in one direction only, that Alex Chilton, the New York Dolls, and the Damned name-check the Shangri-Las for a bit of comic relief because they find the songs funny. But these groups are not otherwise humorless; all three have a proven track record—as I’ve suggested in the case of Alex Chilton—of drawing inspiration from various facets of pop culture, often to comedic effect. It then follows that these groups might be likely to laugh just as often at themselves, and practically everything else, as they do at the Shangri-Las. Maybe they like the Shangri-Las because they, too, are humorists. Maybe because they don’t take themselves too seriously—a rare trait in rock bands—the “funny people” of rock ’n’ roll have had a better track record of fairness toward the often-derided side of pop; the Dead Milkmen, who reference country singer/ humorist Minnie Pearl twice in their song “Punk Rock Girl,” seem like a prime example of an egalitarianism that takes the form of eclecticism—they position themselves in defiance against genre boundaries and emblazon themselves with the witty erudition of Pop Art. They are at once holier than punk and no better than the lowliest pop. 102

D O E S T H I S S O U N D FA M I L IA R ?

I think immediately of Redd Kross, who have referenced the Shangri-Las frequently in their decades-long career. The somewhat-obscure and often-underrated California-based indie band, masters of pastiche that they are, owe their entire essence to pop culture. On their 1984 cover album, Teen Babes from Monsanto, the band reimagines a Kiss cover, a version of the Rolling Stones’s “Citadel,” and most bizarrely, a rendition of “Blow You a Kiss in the Wind,” a song performed by Elizabeth Montgomery in the TV series Bewitched. “Blow You a Kiss in the Wind” is a gesture that parallels Chilton’s version of “Sugar Sugar.” It drops the pretension of rock-star superiority and cops to a rock star faux pas, the sin of watching TV. On Teen Babes, Redd Kross also perform a version of the Shangri-Las’s “Heaven Only Knows,” but this is actually one of the least out-there covers they attempt—the song, jangly and bubblegum perfect, sung with a bit of schoolboy attitude, seems like the prototype of every song they ever tried to write. Jeff McDonald’s shakeup of the song’s finale, the addition of “heaven only knows I despise you / heaven only knows I idolize you,” is the perfect synthesis of awe and snark—eau de teenager. The examples go on—Nick Lowe, a notorious master of rock witticism and imitation, included the addition of “Rollers Show” on the US release of Pure Pop For Now People (Jesus of Cool in the UK), a spot-on parody of the Scottish teeny-bop group Bay City Rollers that expertly juggles homage and tongue-in-cheek sarcasm. Both the LP covers for Pure Pop and Jesus of Cool (which feature subtle differences) exemplify Lowe’s dexterity in the realm of masquerade: he is depicted in six different outfits with six 103

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

different guitars. Lowe’s debut album is itself an exercise in that same kind of mutability—different versions of Lowe embodied confidently, lovingly, and absolutely imbued with irony. He is the Bay City Rollers one moment, and the next he is Thin Lizzy or Steely Dan. A fact that often goes unmentioned is that Nick Lowe produced the Damned’s 1976 single “New Rose” and a year later their debut album Damned Damned Damned. Lowe’s influence on that first single is crystal clear; the reference to the Shangri-Las is something straight from Lowe’s familiar book of tricks, although Vanian’s dry delivery is entirely unlike Lowe’s mellifluous style of pastiche. Like Shadow Morton’s work with the New York Dolls on Too Much Too Soon, Nick Lowe and the Damned eulogize the specter of 1960s’ pop through the very apt channel of punk rock, the only requirement being that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Whether it’s the cover of Too Much Too Soon, which captures the Dolls in their full big-hair platform-shoe glory, or that of Damned Damned Damned, which features the lads with a quite literal pie in their faces, both iterations find a vaudevillian freedom in playing the role of the fool. Later iterations of Shangri-Las’s songs, namely Aerosmith’s rendition of “Walkin in the Sand” in the late 1970s and Twisted Sister’s 1985 take on “Leader of the Pack,” follow up with an even more drastic acceptance of the group’s histrionics. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the soap-opera plots and virtuosic song structures find a perfect kinship with the hammy theatrics of hair metal, on the one hand, and Steven Tyler’s vocal gymnastics on the other.

104

D O E S T H I S S O U N D FA M I L IA R ?

Ellis is quite right to suggest that funny people, and humor in general, are often undersold in rock ’n’ roll. As Lester Bangs wrote in 1970 in defense of the Stooges’s Funhouse: What we need are more rock “stars” willing to make fools of themselves, absolutely jump off the deep end and make the audience embarrassed for them if necessary, so long as they have not one shred of dignity or mythic corona left. Because then the whole damn pompous edifice of this supremely ridiculous rock ’n’ roll industry, set up to grab bucks by conning youth and encouraging fantasies of a puissant “youth culture,” would collapse, and with it would collapse the careers of the hyped talentless nonentities who breed off of it.5 While Bangs might not have had the Shangri-Las in mind, I believe theirs is the type of melodrama he writes of: pathos to a point of no return, teen angst with preposterously dire consequences. Mary Weiss’s performance in “Past, Present and Future” approaches foolishness while it risks—and perhaps causes—embarrassment. Alex Chilton’s embarrassment is palpable in his rendition of the song, but he sees it through. He jumps off the diving board of Bangs’s imagining and certainly provokes the ridicule of the audience—to a point. Amid the laughter, there is some cheering. When Chilton falters at the end of a line, sprawling it out in his lazy, bluesy way, an impatient audience member beats him to the punch, shouting, “again!” It’s the word Chilton needs to move on to the guitar solo, a relief of sorts; somewhere in the laughing crowd, there is another fool.

105

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

To really understand the legacy of the Shangri-Las, it seems right to leave the ball in Mary Weiss’s court. Weiss, for one, has led a largely private life and said relatively little about her time with the group. It’s hard to fault her, exactly, especially after so many years and such a diminishment of public interest in the group. What sounds like a disparaging ending has a silver lining though because after many years Weiss did have her moment. The story of the Shangri-Las is perennially unofficial: there’s no script, no accepted narrative, no one who wants to set the record straight. It’s a kaleidoscopic story—a legacy refracted in all the songs that exist in their wake that found inspiration in some small part of their being. Their legacy is their folk history told through songs rather than facts. Somewhat appropriately, Weiss’s comeback didn’t take the form of a book, or documentary— she came out of nowhere and gave us exactly what we had really cared about from the very beginning: music. Dangerous Game (2007) is an album that seems at peace with the legacy of the Shangri-Las—relishing it at times while at others holding it at a distance. Comeback may be somewhat of a misnomer, mind you, because Dangerous Game is above all else an understated album, nowhere near the bombastic hitmaking material of her teen years. Nevertheless, somewhat surprisingly, the subject matter Weiss’s sings about isn’t much altered from her youthful songs of heartbreak and anguish. Gone are the days of elaborate string accompaniments and fatal car crashes—absences that are only to the music’s slight detriment. The new Weiss, however, still sings about boys and betrayal. Perhaps most satisfyingly, though, she puts up a better defense than when she was young. One song on 106

D O E S T H I S S O U N D FA M I L IA R ?

Dangerous Game is called “You’re Never Gonna See Me Cry,” another “Don’t Come Back.” This is a far cry from the bereft young heroine of “Remember” or “Past, Present and Future.” In the decades since leaving the music business, Mary Weiss has apparently learned a lot about life. Fittingly, her ingénue persona has adapted. Dangerous Game reveals how Weiss sees the place of the Shangri-Las within the larger scheme of rock history. Mary, too, sees the Shangri-Las as an extremely idiosyncratic group, able to shape-shift at will between bubblegum pop and rock ’n’ roll grooves. Backed and mostly written by Memphis garage outfit Reigning Sound, the album leans heavily toward the rock end of the spectrum, although Dangerous Game is certainly filtered through a pop lens. Though the album is self-reflexive—in no way a denial of Weiss’s pop past—it also reflects on the years—and music—since the 1960s. Given the sources the album draws from, Weiss gazes upon her musical legacy, at last rejoining the musical world that she had a hand in creating. Dangerous Game decidedly fits the niche of nostalgia; Weiss’s return to music doesn’t feel like it’s grasping for relevance in a new era of pop music. Rather, it feels as though she is picking up right where she left off, as if no time had elapsed in the interim. But at certain points the album pivots and we remember that the world has changed in Weiss’s absence. “Kids don’t know shit,” Mary croons in her song “Cry about the Radio.” On first listen, this one can ring out a little too sanctimoniously, the equivalent of Weiss yelling “hey you kids, get off my lawn!” In her condemnation of the current music scene, Weiss warns that she doesn’t “write hits”—a statement so ridiculous one can only hope she 107

G olde n H its of the Sha n gri - L as

is being ironic. If not, I can’t help but be a little disappointed that Weiss’s assertion of her rock ’n’ roll status comes with distancing herself from her slightly humbler pop origins. I would certainly agree that the Shangri-Las aren’t just a pop group, but doesn’t part of their clandestine subversion lie in the fact that they do not claim to be more than a pop group? They are liminal, existing on the fringe of both pop and rock. Somehow, though, “Cry about the Radio” manages to be the most Shangri-Las song on Dangerous Game. It is even more Shangri-Las than Weiss’s cover of “Heaven Only Knows,” which is, of course, the only honest-to-god Shangri-Las song on the album. “Heaven Only Knows” is a great song, and one that deftly shows off Weiss’s mature vocal range. But it seems to represent the Shangri-Las only provincially. In its cantankerous way, “Cry about the Radio,” on the other hand, truly imparts some of the bleak outlook of the Shangri-Las. Where Weiss was once bemoaning her lost innocence, “Cry about the Radio” finds her mourning the loss of music to the iTunes era. “Music’s got no place to go,” she sings in the chorus, and her tone suddenly transports us to that old solipsism—the all-encompassing gloom of the Shangri-Las, which saw no end to teenage strife, no hope for a better future. Despite her protestations, Weiss is living proof that such dire predictions rarely come to pass. Unlike her many characters, Weiss made it out of the teenage mire in one piece—and if the album she released in her latefifties is any indication, the adult world didn’t turn out to be as straight, as bleak or as boring as anticipated. As for the death of music, well, Weiss again stands as a living antithesis; the hard-scrabble survival instinct that drove her to return 108

D O E S T H I S S O U N D FA M I L IA R ?

after a forty-year absence is proof not of the invincibility of music, but rather its pathological inescapability. But like Walt Whitman, like us all, Weiss contains multitudes. We surpass our own expectations. We defeat ourselves. When we listen to the Shangri-Las, we delight in nostalgia—not for some past idyll, some halcyon moment of pop gone by—but for our own heady teenage minds, ridiculous and tragic, under whose spell we are all rendered powerless.

109

110

Notes

Introduction 1 Gibsone, Harriet. “Introducing the Band: Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite interviews the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid.” The Guardian, June 15, 2015. Accessed November 30, 2017. https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/mu​sic/2​015/j​un/15​/mogw​ai-st​ uart-​brait​hwait​e-int​ervie​ws-je​sus-a​nd-ma​ry-ch​ain-j​im-re​id-al​ l-tom​orrow​s-par​ties.​

Sophisticated Boom Boom 1 Betrock, Alan. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound. New York: Delilah, 1982. 2 Warwick, Jacqueline. Girl Groups, Girl Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 20. 3 Warwick, 90. 4 Ibid. 5 Austerlitz, Saul. “The Pernicious Rise of Poptimism.” The New York Times, April 4, 2014. Accessed November 30, 2017.

Notes

https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​014/0​4/06/​magaz​ine/t​he-pe​rnici​ ous-r​ise-o​f-pop​timis​m.htm​l?_r=​0. 6 Gioia, Ted. “Music Criticism Has Degenerated into Lifestyle Reporting.” The Daily Beast, March 18, 2014. Accessed November 30, 2017. http:​//www​.thed​ailyb​east.​com/a​rticl​es/20​ 14/03​/18/m​usic-​criti​cism-​has-d​egene​rated​-into​-life​style​-repo​ rting​.html​. 7 Sanneh, Kelefa. “The Rap against Rockism.” The New York Times, October 31, 2004. Accessed November 30, 2017. http:​ //www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​04/10​/31/a​rts/m​usic/​the-r​ap-ag​ainst​ -rock​ism.h​tml?_​r=0. 8 Gioia, 2014. 9 Sanneh, 2004. 10 Austerlitz, 2014. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Sanneh, 2004. 14 Alpert, Steve. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound (1983). New York, NY: MGM/UA Home Video, 2007, DVD. 15 Ibid. 16 Yandoli, Kayla. “17 Popular Songs You Never Knew Were Written by Carole King.” BuzzFeed Community. Accessed November 30, 2017. https​://ww​w.buz​zfeed​.com/​kayla​yando​ li/17​-popu​lar-s​ongs-​you-n​ever-​knew-​were-​writt​en-by​-ca-c​ qn5?u​tm_te​rm=.r​wlmeO​dwg#.​vawnd​9W4D.​ 17 Warwick, 110. 18 MacLeod, Sean. Leaders of the Pack: Girl Groups of the 1960s and Their Influence on Popular Culture in Britain and America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, p. 25.

112

NOTES

19 Warwick, 74. 20 Alpert, Steve. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound. 21 Warwick, 16. 22 Alpert, Steve. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound. 23 “The Leader of the Pack Is Back.” NYMag.com. Accessed November 30, 2017. http:​//nym​ag.co​m/art​s/pop​music​/prof​ iles/​28500​/inde​x1.ht​ml.

Out in the Streets 1 Carlson, Jen. “Was the Best Girl Band Ever From . . . Queens?” Gothamist, March 28, 2013. Accessed November 30, 2017. http:​//got​hamis​t.com​/2013​/03/2​8/wat​ch_qu​eens_​nativ​es_th​ e_sha​ngri-​la.ph​p. 2 Warwick, 189. 3 Ibid. 4 Alpert, Steve. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound. 5 Warwick, 192. 6 Nosowitz, Dan. “Why There’s No Such Thing as a Brooklyn Accent.” Atlas Obscura, November 11, 2016. Accessed November 30, 2017. http:​//www​.atla​sobsc​ura.c​om/ar​ticle​s/ why​-ther​es-no​-such​-thin​g-as-​a-bro​oklyn​-acce​nt. 7 Ibid. 8 Stras, Laurie. “Voice of the Beehive: Vocal Technique at the Turn of the 1960s.” In She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music, by Laurie Stras. New York: Routledge, 2016, p. 52.

113

Notes

9 Boone, Kurt. “Green Grass and Guns.” Narratively, January 28, 2016. Accessed November 30, 2017. http:​//nar​rativ​e.ly/​green​ -gras​s-and​-guns​/. 10 Aitch, Iain. “The Leader’s Back.” The Telegraph, April 14, 2007. Accessed September 9, 2017. http:​//www​.tele​graph​.co.u​k/cul​ ture/​36644​89/Th​e-Lea​ders-​back.​html.​ 11 “Mary Weiss Comes Back for a Dangerous Game.” Fresh Air, from NPR, March 6, 2007. https​://ww​w.npr​.org/​templ​ates/​ story​/stor​y.php​?stor​yId=7​72878​3. 12 Alpert, Steve. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound. 13 “Bumpy, Bikers and the Story Behind ‘Leader of the Pack.’” Fresh Air, from NPR, September 26, 2013. https​://ww​w.npr​ .org/​2013/​09/26​/2004​45875​/bump​y-bik​ers-a​nd-th​e-sto​ry-be​ hind-​leade​r-of-​the-p​ack. 14 “How Shadow Morton Helped Launch the ’60s.” The New York Times, December 21, 2013. Accessed December 1, 2017. https​ ://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/n​ews/t​he-li​ves-t​hey-l​ived/​2013/​12/21​/ shad​ow-mo​rton/​. 15 Ibid. 16 Griffin, John; Neville, Morgan. The Songmakers Collection. A&E Home Video, 2001. DVD. 17 Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 2010, p. 39. 18 Aitch, Iain. “The Leader’s Back.” The Telegraph, April 14, 2007. Accessed September 9, 2017. http:​//www​.tele​graph​.co.u​k/cul​ ture/​36644​89/Th​e-Lea​ders-​back.​html.​ 19 “Mary Weiss Comes Back for a Dangerous Game.” Fresh Air, from NPR, March 6, 2007. https​://ww​w.npr​.org/​templ​ates/​ story​/stor​y.php​?stor​yId=7​72878​3.

114

NOTES

20 Getlen, Larry. “Ahead of the ‘Pack’: How the Shangri-Las Created Punk.” New York Post, May 17, 2014. Accessed December 1, 2017. https​://ny​post.​com/2​014/0​5/17/​ahead​-ofthe-pa​ck-ho​w-the​-shan​gri-l​as-cr​eated​-punk​/. 21 Alpert, Steve. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound.

What Is Love? 1 Gioia, Ted. Love Songs: The Hidden History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 27. 2 Gioia, p. 26. 3 Ibid., pp. 26–27. 4 Ibid., p. 27. 5 Smith, Patricia Juliana. “Ask Any Girl: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Girl Group Culture.” In Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics, by Kevin J. H. Dettmar and William Richey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 93. 6 Smith, p. 94. 7 Ibid., p. 110. 8 Ibid. 9 Wordsworth, William. “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed April 4, 2017. https​://ww​w.poe​tryfo​ undat​ion.o​rg/po​ems-a​nd-po​ets/p​oems/​detai​l/455​53. 10 Halter, Ed. “A Listener’s Guide to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising.” Crosscuts. Accessed April 4, 2017. http:​//blo​gs.wa​lkera​ rt.or​g/fil​mvide​o/201​5/08/​18/a-​liste​ners-​guide​-to-k​ennet​h-ang​ ers-s​corpi​o-ris​ing/.​

115

Notes

At the Moment, It Doesn’t Look Good 1 “First proposed by John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), a haecceity is a non-qualitative property responsible for individuation and identity. As understood by Scotus, a haecceity is not a bare particular in the sense of some underlying qualities. It is, rather, a non-qualitative property of a substance or thing: it is a ‘thisness’ (a haecceitas, from the Latin haec, meaning ‘this’) as opposed to a ‘whatness’ (a quidditas, from the Latin quid, meaning ‘what’). Furthermore, substances, on the sort of metaphysics defended by Scotus, are basically collections of tightly unified properties, all but one of them qualitative; the one non-qualitative property is the haecceity. In contrast to more modern accounts of the problem of individuation, Scotus holds that the haecceity explains more than just the distinction of one substance from another. According to Scotus, the fact that individual substances cannot be instantiated—are indivisible or incommunicable, as Scotus puts it—also requires explaining. In short a haecceity is supposed to explain individuality.”Cross, Richard. “Medieval Theories of Haecceity.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http:​//pla​to.st​anfor​d.edu​/arch​ ives/​sum20​14/en​tries​/medi​eval-​haecc​eity/​. 2 MacLeod, 69. 3 Morris, Mitchell. The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 4 Mitchell, 31. 5 “Melodrama, n.” OED Online. September 2016. Oxford University Press. Accessed November 1, 2016. http:​//www​.oed.​ com/v​iew/E​ntry/​11622​6?red​irect​edFro​m=mel​odram​a&.

116

NOTES

6 Gould, Thomas. The Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 278; emphasis in original. 7 Fuchs, Elinor. “Rehearsing Age.” Modern Drama 59, no. 2 (2016): 143–54. https://muse.jhu.edu/.

Shangri-La, or Tomorrow’s a Long Way Off 1 McKinney, Devin. “Pop Irony—Past, Present, and Future.” The American Prospect. Accessed November 15, 2017. http:​//pro​ spect​.org/​artic​le/po​p-iro​ny-pa​st-pr​esent​-and-​futur​e. 2 Ibid. 3 “Subjunctive, Adj. and n.” OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. Accessed August 22, 2017. http:​//www​.oed.​ com/v​iew/E​ntry/​19273​1?red​irect​edFro​m=sub​junct​ive. 4 Hilton, James. Lost Horizon. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1933, p. 188. 5 Hilton, p. 188. 6 Austin, Linda M. “Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy.” Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 76. 7 Austin, 80. 8 Blake, William. Selected Poems. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005, p. 28. 9 “The Leader of the Pack Is Back.” NYMag.com. Accessed November 30, 2017. http:​//nym​ag.co​m/art​s/pop​music​/prof​ iles/​28500​/inde​x1.ht​ml. 10 Eaton, Oline. “‘We Must Be Ready Every Day, All the Time’: Mid-Twentieth-Century Nuclear Anxiety and Fear of Death in 117

Notes

American Life.” Journal of American Culture 40, no. 1 (2017): 66–75. 11 Savage, Jon. “Pop in the Age of the Atomic Bomb.” The Guardian, October 31, 2010. Accessed May 4, 2016. https​://ww​ w.the​guard​ian.c​om/mu​sic/2​010/o​ct/31​/pop-​music​-atom​ic-bo​ mb-jo​n-sav​age.

Does This Sound Familiar? 1 McKinney, Devin. “Pop Irony—Past, Present, and Future.” The American Prospect. Accessed December 1, 2017. http:​//pro​pect. org/​artic​le/po​p-iro​ny-pa​st-pr​esent​-and-​futur​e. 2 Ibid. 3 Ellis, Iain. Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2008, p. 81. 4 Ellis, 79. 5 Bangs, Lester; Marcus, Greil. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. New York: Random House, 2003, p. 34.

118

Works Cited

Aitch, Iain. “The Leader’s Back.” The Telegraph, April 14, 2007. http:​//www​.tele​graph​.co.u​k/cul​ture/​36644​89/Th​e-Lea​ders-​ back.​html.​ Alpert, Steve. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound. 1983. New York, NY: MGM/UA Home Video, 2007. DVD. Austerlitz, Saul. “The Pernicious Rise of Poptimism.” The New York Times, April 4, 2014. https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​014/0​4/06/​ magaz​ine/t​he-pe​rnici​ous-r​ise-o​f-pop​timis​m.htm​l?_r=​0. Austin, Linda M. “Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy.” Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 76. Bangs, Lester; Marcus, Greil. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. New York: Random House, 2003, p. 34. Betrock, Alan. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound. New York: Delilah, 1982. Blake, William. Selected Poems. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005, p. 28. Boone, Kurt. “Green Grass and Guns.” Narratively, January 28, 2016. http:​//nar​rativ​e.ly/​green​-gras​s-and​-guns​/. “Bumpy, Bikers and the Story Behind ‘Leader of the Pack.’” Fresh Air, from NPR, September 26, 2013. https​://ww​w.npr​.org/​2013/​ 09/26​/2004​45875​/bump​y-bik​ers-a​nd-th​e-sto​ry-be​hind-​leaderof-​the-p​ack.

Works C ited

Carlson, Jen. “Was the Best Girl Band Ever From... Queens?” Gothamist, March 28, 2013. http:​//got​hamis​t.com​/2013​/03/2​8/ wat​ch_qu​eens_​nativ​es_th​e_sha​ngri-​la.ph​p. Cross, Richard. “Medieval Theories of Haecceity.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http:​//pla​to.st​anfor​d.edu​/arch​ives/​sum20​14/en​tries​/ medi​eval-​haecc​eity/​. Eaton, Oline. “‘We Must Be Ready Every Day, All the Time’: Mid-Twentieth-Century Nuclear Anxiety and Fear of Death in American Life.” Journal of American Culture 40, no. 1 (2017): 66–75. Eco, Umberto. Reflections on the Name of the Rose; trans. William Weaver. London: Minerva, 1994. Ellis, Iain. Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2008. Fuchs, Elinor. “Rehearsing Age.” Modern Drama 59, no. 2 (2016): 143–54. https://muse.jhu.edu/. Getlen, Larry. “Ahead of the ‘Pack’: How the Shangri-Las Created Punk.” New York Post, May 17, 2014. https​://ny​post.​com/2​014/0​ 5/17/​ahead​-of-t​he-pa​ck-ho​w-the​-shan​gri-l​as-cr​eated​-punk​/. Gibsone, Harriet. “Introducing the Band: Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite Interviews the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid.” The Guardian, June 15, 2015. https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/mu​ sic/2​015/j​un/15​/mogw​ai-st​uart-​brait​hwait​e-int​ervie​ws-je​sus-a​ nd-ma​ry-ch​ain-j​im-re​id-al​l-tom​orrow​s-par​ties.​ Gioia, Ted. Love Songs: The Hidden History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Gioia, Ted. “Music Criticism Has Degenerated into Lifestyle Reporting.” The Daily Beast, March 18, 2014. http:​//www​.thed​ ailyb​east.​com/a​rticl​es/20​14/03​/18/m​usic-​criti​cism-​has-d​egene​ rated​-into​-life​style​-repo​rting​.html​. Gould, Thomas. The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 120

WO R K S C I T E D

Griffin, John; Neville, Morgan. The Songmakers Collection. A&E Home Video, 2001. DVD. Halter, Ed. “A Listener’s Guide to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising.” Crosscuts. http:​//blo​gs.wa​lkera​rt.or​g/fil​mvide​o/201​5/08/​18/a-​ liste​ners-​guide​-to-k​ennet​h-ang​ers-s​corpi​o-ris​ing/.​ Hilton, James. Lost Horizon. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1933. “How Shadow Morton Helped Launch the ’60s.” The New York Times, December 21, 2013. https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/n​ews/t​ he-li​ves-t​hey-l​ived/​2013/​12/21​/shad​ow-mo​rton/​. MacLeod, Sean. Leaders of the Pack: Girl Groups of the 1960s and Their Influence on Popular Culture in Britain and America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Martin, Michael. “The Leader of the Pack Is Back.” NYMag.com. http:​//nym​ag.co​m/art​s/pop​music​/prof​i les/​28500​/inde​x1.ht​ml. “Mary Weiss Comes Back for a Dangerous Game.” Fresh Air, from NPR, March 6, 2007. https​://ww​w.npr​.org/​templ​ates/​story​/stor​ y.php​?stor​yId=7​72878​3. “Melodrama, n.” OED Online, September 2016. Oxford University Press. http:​//www​.oed.​com/v​iew/E​ntry/​11622​6?red​irect​edFro​ m=mel​odram​a& (accessed November 1, 2016). Morris, Mitchell. The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Nosowitz, Dan. “Why There’s No Such Thing as a Brooklyn Accent.” Atlas Obscura, November 11, 2016. http:​//www​.atla​ sobsc​ura.c​om/ar​ticle​s/why​-ther​es-no​-such​-thin​g-as-​a-bro​ oklyn​-acce​nt. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 2010. Sanneh, Kelefa. “The Rap against Rockism.” The New York Times, October 31, 2004. http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​04/10​/31/a​rts/m​ usic/​the-r​ap-ag​ainst​-rock​ism.h​tml?_​r=0. Savage, Jon. “Pop in the Age of the Atomic Bomb.” The Guardian, October 31, 2010. https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/mu​sic/2​010/ 121

Works C ited

o​ct/31​/pop-​music​-atom​ic-bo​mb-jo​n-sav​age (accessed May 4, 2016). Smith, Patricia Juliana. “Ask Any Girl: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Girl Group Culture.” In Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics, edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar and William Richey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Stras, Laurie. “Voice of the Beehive: Vocal Technique at the Turn of the 1960s.” In She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music, edited by Laurie Stras. New York: Routledge, 2016. Warwick, Jacqueline. Girl Groups, Girl Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007. Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself (1892 Version).” Poetry Foundation. https​://ww​w.poe​tryfo​undat​ion.o​rg/po​ems/4​5477/​ song-​of-my​self-​1892-​versi​on. Wordsworth, William. “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” Poetry Foundation. https​://ww​w.poe​tryfo​undat​ion.o​rg/po​ems-a​nd-po​ ets/p​oems/​detai​l/455​53. Yandoli, Kayla. “17 Popular Songs You Never Knew Were Written by Carole King.” BuzzFeed Community. https​://ww​w.buz​zfeed. com/​kayla​yando​li/17​-popu​lar-s​ongs-​you-n​ever-​knew-​were-​ writt​en-by​-ca-c​qn5?u​tm_te​rm=.r​wlmeO​dwg#.​vawnd​9W4D.​

122

Also available in the series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing … by Eliot Wilder

A lso available i n the series

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s in the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ on by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk about Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris

124

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo

74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

125

A lso available i n the series

90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley

106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids on the Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli

126

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

121. Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk's Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin

129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman 132. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel 133. Siouxsie and the Banshees' Peepshow by Samantha Bennett 134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson 135. Tori Amos's Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry 136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson 137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans

127

128