Jerry Leiber dies

[Diego_Sideburns]

Born Jerome Leiber, 25 April 1933, Baltimore, Maryland - Songwriter, Record Producer and Arranger.

 

When he was five Jerry's father died and his mother took the insurance money and opened up a grocery store on the edge of the black ghetto. It became Jerry's job to deliver groceries to the homes of black customers. It was at these homes that he heard the rhythm and blues that would become an important part of his life. With his mother working from dawn to dusk, Jerry grew up on the streets.

 

At the age of nine he began taking piano lessons at his Uncle Dave's house. But Uncle David hated the sound of the boogie-woogie licks his nephew kept hammering away at and stopped the lessons. In 1945, his mother moved them out to Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus. At 13 there, he wanted to be an actor. When he was sixteen, he began working in a record store on Fairfax Avenue. He was listening to rhythm and blues and began jotting down his own blues lyrics in a series of notebooks. But he could not write music so he began searching for a collaborator.

 

Through a drummer friend he met Mike Stoller, then a student at Fairfax High with an after-school job at a record store. They spent that summer writing songs that reflected their shared love of black pop music, and before the year was out Jimmy Witherspoon had recorded and performed Leiber and Stoller's "Real Ugly Woman" in concert.

 

Rock 'n' roll is said to have been formed from a fusion between black rhythm and blues and white entrepreneurship. If so, then the foremost of the fair-skinned founding fathers must be Leiber and Stoller. They put the growl in the hound dog, the rock in the jailhouse and the magic in Love Potion Number Nine. When they started out, people were basically just doing love songs. They wrote story songs about a kid getting yelled at by his parents. No one was doing that.

 

They've written more than 50 hits including "Kansas City," "Stand by Me," "On Broadway," "Yakety Yak," "Love Me," "Spanish Harlem," "Charlie Brown," "Treat Me Nice," "Young Blood," "I Who Have Nothing," "Is That All There Is?" and "There Goes My Baby".

 

The hits of The Drifters, the Coasters and Elvis Presley all drew heavily from their work. Other artists who have cut their tunes include The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Ray Charles, John Lennon, Edith Piaf, Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters, The Everly Brothers, John Mellencamp, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Conway Twitty, Joni Mitchell, Count Basie, Dion, Peggy Lee, The Monkees, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Neville Brothers, Johnny Mathis, Buddy Holly, Bobby Darin, Billy Eckstine, Ben E. King, Barbra Streisand, Luther Vandross and Donna Summer.

 

They are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Record Producers Hall of Fame. In 1995 they added Broadway to their list of conquered realms when "Smokey Joe's Cafe: the Songs of Leiber and Stoller" opened and gained seven Tony nominations. The production also won the Grammy for best musical.

 

Around this time, they decided to relocate back east to New York to be closer to the virtual teen pop factory centred in and around New York's Brill Building. There they worked with and became mentors to such new leading song originators as Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Barry Mann and Carole King, Neil Sedaka, and Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. They also provided a song-writing job for a hungry kid named Neil Diamond.

 

They furthered the evolution of rock by taking under their wings a young producer, Phil Spector, evolving the predecessor of his "wall of sound".

 

For these two multi-talented composer/songwriters, the term 'rock royalty' means something more than just the money they continued to collect from their numerous hits generated during rock's first decade.

 

Thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing

Thanks for all the joy they're bringing

Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty

What would life be?

Without a song or a dance what are we?

So I say thank you for the music

For giving it to me.

 

R.I.P. Jerry

Long live rock 'n' roll.

Leiber & Stoller tribute

[beag_teeets]

Very sad news.

 

Without him we wouldn't have had the Smiths as it was a late-night viewing of a video on the life of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller that convinced Johnny Marr to get in touch with Stephen Morrissey.

 

RIP Jerry.