Leiber and Stoller

Image: Leiber and Stoller

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller are, undoubtedly, the greatest songwriting team in the history of rock 'n' roll. During the period of their most intense prodcutivity, from the mid-'50s to the early '60s, they wrote, arranged and produced a series of pop classics for artists such as Elvis Presley ('Hound Dog', 'Jailhouse Rock'), The Coasters ('Charlie Brown', etc), Ben E King ('Stand By Me') and the Drifters ('There Goes My Baby'). In recent years their work has been showcased and celebrated in the internationally successful musical, Smokey Joe's Café.

They were interviewed on Wednesday 27 June 2001 by Adrian Wootton at the British premiere of a new documentary about their career: Words and Music by Leiber & Stoller.

The backroom boys

Adrian Wootton: Welcome to the NFT, and there's also another, important, reason why you're here - you're actually receiving an award.

Mike Stoller: Well, we're having a tribute concert, which will be very nice.

AW: Which is in aid of the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy charity, on Friday night. Mojo, the sponsors of tonight's event, polled their readers and selected one question. The question is asking about what, in terms of definitive interpretations of your songs, you've heard many different versions, the question is really asking whether you were ever frustrated by being, what he describes as, 'backroom boys'? Did you ever want to be performers yourselves?

MS: I think Jerry did.

Jerry Leiber: He always looks like he tells the truth, but he doesn't. I knew that I wasn't really a good enough singer. I knew that I was good enough to make a demonstration record. And we both knew this about each other, and that's one of the reasons we've been partners and friends for so many years, because we know so many loathsome things about each other...

[Laughter]

...that we couldn't really hook up with anybody else because everybody in town knew it.

I have a question for you. How much did they pay for the award they're going to give us?

AW: That I don't know! In the documentary it talks about your first meeting and how you started writing together, but I'm still interested in how, at the ages of 17, 18, 19, you managed to persuade black artists to listen to your songs and to want to record your songs. How did you get into that world?

JL: That's a very simple story, would you like me to tell that one?

MS: Sure.

JL: It started in a record shop. I was a clerk in a record shop on Fairfax Avenue and I was about 16. School finished at three, and I worked from three-thirty to six-thirty. One day a young man came in, who was very well dressed, I'll never forget his suit - he was wearing a beige suit with a very thin blue stripe - and I was wondering where I could get a suit like that. I asked him to sell it to me one time, but he wouldn't. His name was Lester Sill, and he was the head of promotions and sales at Modern Records. He came into the shop and started chatting to me, and he had some records under his arm and he said, 'When you grow up, what do you want to be?'

And I said, 'I'm going to be a songwriter.'

And he said, 'Well that's interesting, have you written any songs?'

I said, 'Well I've written some lyrics, but I don't really have any music. They're actually all written to eight-bar/twelve-bar blues.'

He said, 'Why don't you sing me one?'

I said, 'You're kidding? Right here in the store?'

He said, 'Yeah, sing me a song.'

'My boss is back there doing inventory, he'll fire me, or have me committed or something.'

'Don't worry about Norty, I know Norty, he's an old buddy of mine. You can sing a song.'

So I sang about eight bars of a song and he said, 'You're a songwriter, that's a good song. Now you've get to get some music to it. You know how to write music?'

'No.'

'Can you read music?'

'No. I can barely read English.'

So he says that we have to find a partner to write with. I was writing with someone, that person couldn't make the next date and in the hall of Fairfax High School we broke company, but he said, 'I met a guy who played the dance last week and he's a real good piano player. Real good.'

MS: That was a long time ago...

JL: So he said, 'I think you should call him up, he'd be very interested in writing songs.' Well, I took the number right away because Lester Sill told me I was good, and if I got a lead-sheet on a song then he'd take me someplace.

I'm getting to the answer here, your answer's coming up. It takes a long time.

MS: What was the question?

JL: I don't know. How we got started in the record business...

[Laughter]

JL: So I called him up. I said, 'Is this Mike Stoller?', and he said, 'Yup.' I said, 'Are you the piano player?'

'Yup.'

'Are you the guy that played the dance last weekend with Jerry Horowitz the drummer in East LA somewhere?'

'Yup.'

'Do you read music?'

'Yup.'

'Can you write notes down on music paper?'

'Yup.'

'Would you be interested in writing songs?'

'Nope.'

[Laughter]

So I talked to him for another twenty-five minutes and somehow convinced him.

MS: He was very persuasive. I said to him, finally, because I couldn't get him off the phone, 'If you want to come over, come over.' And I gave him my address. As I hung up the phone, the doorbell rang. It was like Roadrunner.

[Laughter]

Modern Records

AW: And it was Lester Sill that provided that entrance to the artists that you first...

JL: Well, he introduced us Modern records, to the Robins. And to Gene Norman, who had a blues jamboree, and to Johnny Otis. That resulted in the Big Mama Thornton record. He introduced us to anybody we met. He knew them all. Ralph Bass, King, Federal Records.

MS: Lester was the sales manager for Modern Records.

JL: Lester introduced us to everybody. That's how it started. We couldn't have cracked the music business in any way at that time, going to the major publishers like Chapel - they wouldn't see us. You had to be recommended, and we had no-one to recommend us except Lester.

MS: We also couldn't get into the major record labels, fortunately as it turns out, because we weren't writing the kind of things that they wanted. The only labels that were interested in what we were doing were independent Rhythm and Blues record labels.

AW: How quickly did you realise that you wanted to produce records instead of just being songwriters who submitted songs to other people?

JL: By the time the Spark [with Lester Sill in 54] situation arose, and gave us an opportunity to do something, we had decided by that time. We had been in the business a couple of years and we'd seen some A&R men mess up our music - misunderstand it. We gave a song to Capital records, and it was kind of a jump record, the kind that Joe Liggins would make or Sonny Thompson...

MS: It came back like a 1940s swing band.

JL: Yeah, so forget it, it's over.

AW: Production has all kinds of different elements to it - was this something you learned on the job, or was Spark the opportunity for you to produce your own records?

MS: In a way it was, because we just went into the studio and did what we wanted to do. But we had a few people that you could say were mentors - people like Maxwell Davis. He would supervise sessions like "Kansas City", and we would learn things from watching somebody who knew what they were doing.

JL: It was more an accumulation of experience, an overlapping of time and experience. By the way, nobody ever got to be so great - I think George Martin would be one of the tops, but nobody ever mastered every category. You'd get a great Country and Western producer and I wouldn't think, most of the time, that he would want to play with Dizzy Gillespie's band. Jazz is a very special thing, it takes a very special touch. All the categories, respectively, take that, so it takes most of your lifetime to learn how to make anything well.

Elvis

AW: Let's touch on Elvis. It's talked about how much he was his own producer in the studio with a lot of the records he made, but you developed quite a close affinity with him in the studio.

MS: Over a short period of time. He knew a lot of the records we made. He'd heard them, and he asked for us to be present in the studio when he was doing the pre-recordings of the songs on Jailhouse Rock. That was the first time we ever met him, in the studio. In effect we actually produced those records, without credit, we were happy to make sure our songs were done well. He was really easy to work with.

AW: You talked in the documentary about how you were getting sick of the production line of those films, and the quality of those films. Would I also be right in saying that your relationship with Colonel Parker wasn't as enjoyable as your relationship with Elvis Presley?

MS: That's true, but in effect it became the same thing, because the Colonel only allowed Elvis so much leeway, he kept him pretty confined.

JL: He kept him on a very tight leash. We weren't trashing the commercial film world, but we'd made about four or five of those movies, and they were going to be almost identical.

I went to a party at a very elegant lady's house on the Upper East Side, and she, Jean Howard, had been married to Charlie Feldman, a very important agent. I went to this party and she introduced me to Charlie Feldman, and Charlie said, 'I know what you and your partner are doing, you're doing great work. I've got a proposition to offer you. Sit down, I'll tell you what it is. I've got an option on a book, which I think is one of the unheralded masterpieces of American literature, it's called 'Walk on the Wildside.'

The list of credits he had arranged was a Who's Who of film-making.

'And we want Elvis Presley to play the lead.'

I had read the book about four or five years before, and thought it was marvellous. So I got very excited.

We went to lay out this fantastic proposition. I told Julian Arerbach, very excitedly and he listened and he was quiet...

MS: Then he sent us out of the room. He said, 'I must speak with the Colonel.' We were sitting out there, so excited about what this could mean, for us to be able to write songs for a movie with all these fabulous people.

Then we were summoned back into the office, and we were informed by Jean Arerbach that the Colonel said, 'If you ever try to interfere in the career of Elvis Presley, you will never work again - not in LA, New York or anywhere.'

JL: Not even Nashville.

[Laughter]

MS: Shortly after that we stopped, because it was such a disappointment. To go back to writing for these terrible scripts would have been too depressing.

Atlantic Records

AW: Then you entered a creative golden age in your work with Atlantic through the late fifties and early sixties. How did the mentoring work? You knew Burt Bacharach, and several people said that you changed their careers while you were at Atlantic. How did that work?

MS: Well, it varied with different people. With Bacharach and David, we didn't teach Burt how to write music, hardly, but he was very curious about the effects and rhythms we used, and the instruments we used. He adopted those in his recordings.

JL: Burt is a composer, so I'm not going to discuss lyrics with Burt, but I would discuss lyrics only... only when I felt something could be much better. Or if I felt something was missing. For instance, Save the Last Dance did not have a bridge when the writers came in to play it. They didn't feel it. I gave them a start on it, wrote two or four lines, and they finished it. I felt good about it. I thought it was balanced, what I required from it.

MS: I adjusted the music somewhat, so that it didn't become overly repetitious.

JL: We rewrote Save the Last Dance, but we did not take credit for that. We did that as a producer's job. We did the same thing for Up on the Roof, but when it came on to Broadway, that was a much bigger overhaul, and we did rewrite the entire song.

But we would look at their songs the way we looked at our own songs. The way he looks at my lyrics and says, 'I wouldn't put 'to' there.' And I'd say, 'Why not?' and he'd say, 'Because 'to' and 'to' is 'for'. Put 'for' there.'

AW: With Phil Spector, without There Goes My Baby, it seems to me that there couldn't have been a wall of sound. The leap is quite clearly there.

JL: He was our protégé.

MS: He'd written certain things, such as five guitarists at the same time, and various other things. What we did, we recorded each guitar doing a totally thing but what Phil did, he had four guitars and three pianos and two basses and six drummers, whatever, they all did the same thing at the same time. He went for a different kind of feel. We went for instrumental clarity...

JL: He went for weight. A heavy thrust of sound. Now, the wall of sound was not something Phil invented or tried to make at all, he was just very cheap about studio costs. He used to record in a place called Goldstar, and Goldstar was like a toilet - it had nothing but echo in it. Anything you recorded in it, you got this big sound.

[Laughter]

We started that stuff at Atlantic, years ago, when Tommy Dowd, a master of special effects... We wanted to create thunder and lightening and water falling down in the introduction of a blues record. We talked about buying different acetates which had all these different effects on them. He said, 'You don't need that. Just start recording and hold this mike down the toilet.' It sounded just like a storm!

[Laughter]

AW: The end of the Atlantic relationship, or at least the first and most profound ending, that sounds like a pretty painful experience all round. You'd done so much work...

MS: Well, it was a loss for us, in terms of working with the Drifters...

JL: And the friendship, we were very close to Jerry Wexler

MS: And the funny thing is we still are.

Red Bird

AW: You had a lot of success with Red Bird records, but as the documentary illustrates, there were problems there and you were keen to get out. How much was there a problem with Red Bird and the Mob?

JL: That's part two...

MS: It really had to do with boredom. We were very bored with Red Bird, because even though we had numerous hit records - seven top-ten singles the first year, including two number ones - it wasn't the music that came from our hearts and souls. At that point, we were still suffering from the fact that we made some excellent blues records and R&B records, but people weren't buying them at the time.

AW: In terms of the music that you wanted to write... In the eighties and nineties we've seen the wonderful music revue of your songs, Smokey Joe's Café, which ran for a long time on Broadway and here... Do you want to write musicals?

MS: We are writing musicals.

JL: We've been in the process for three or four years. We're almost finished.

AW: That's fantastic. Are we likely to see these soon?

MS: I hope so.

AW: What about films? You obviously broke that relationship with Elvis, but did the idea of writing film soundtracks completely leave you?

MS: I'm happy when they've used songs of ours in films, I'm always happy when people use our stuff. But we've never been as keenly interested in writing for film as we have for theatre.

JL: There's another big reason I think. We've developed as producers as much as songwriters. We know exactly what we want to get out of a piece. In film, you send a song in, and you can forget it. They're going to get an arranger and the musicians, and we've had a very poor record of people interpreting our work properly. It was really in self-defence that we became producers. Film is the same thing, unless it's the film you're making. But that hardly ever happens.

Payola

[Questions from the audience]

Q: How unfinished was the song Stand By Me when Ben E King brought it to you, did you make the arrangement on the spot?

MS: Well, the song wasn't finished when he brought it in. However, it was totally finished before the recording session took place. That's a figment of somebody's imagination, because the arrangement... the bass line I created for it, was picked up and played by the strings, it had bass and guitar playing from the top, and it was a fully orchestrated piece. As was Spanish Harlem. It was the same session. It turned out to be three and a half hours, and what Jerry was referring to [in the documentary] about the half-hour overtime, was that Atlantic was complaining about spending the extra money on this first session for Ben E King as a solo singer. It proved to be worthwhile to them - they had two smash hits.

JL: And one other thing, we never went into a session where every note of the orchestration wasn't written down and in triplicate, so it could be changed quickly. Everybody who could write had a copy of it. We were very well organized.

Q: What are your views on the Payola scandal of the late fifties? Do you think it was a conspiracy to destroy rock and roll?

AW: The scandal being DJs being accused of taking money to play particular records on the radio.

JL: I'll try and answer that. There definitely was... Not that I ever witnessed it, but I knew about it and people talked about it. There was Payola, there still is. It changes hands, it changes institutions, but it's still going on.

MS: I'd like to add that of course it was immoral, but in exposing Payola, what occurred was that it was no longer the independent record promoter or independent label who could get their product exposed, it then became a committee. It made the radio playlist virtually all the same everywhere. It was very difficult to get something new and unique onto the playlist. In effect, the Payola had become institutionalised and the big corporations found a way to pay off whoever was making up the lists.

So in a sense, the radio was probably healthier during the heyday of Payola than it became after that.

JL: It's like tips to ensure prompt service...

[Laughter]

Listen to the lyrics

Q: How did you do your song writing? Did you treat it like a nine-to five job, going into the office everyday?

MS: No, we wrote and planned records for about eighteen hours every day, in an office or our homes.

Q: Did you get more satisfaction from the writing or the production.

JL: The same. If you write something and you like it, and you like it well enough that you can look at it the next morning - which sometimes doesn't happen - and then you execute. That's the toughest part, the execution. To make it sound right and feel right. So it's really a situation that is joined, and if you get both ends together, then it's great.

MS: I would qualify it only in this way - the satisfaction is equal when you've finished writing a good song, or one that you feel is good, and when you've produced a record that you think is really good. The process of writing, I always found, is more satisfying than the process of producing, which is very fast and sometimes the process of writing, other than Hound Dog, which was written in about ten minutes, the process itself is more satisfying to me. The original creating.

Q: The changes in rock and roll in the sixties meant that you could no longer just listen to it and be happy, you were forced to listen to the lyrics...

JL: Oh, that's a drag, definitely...

[Laughter]

Q: The influence of folk music. It became very serious and philosophical...

JL: Can you name one song that you think is like that?

Q: Bob Dylan...

JL: Well, I'd agree with you. Bob Dylan. My goodness...

[Laughter]

Q: If it hadn't have been for Colonel Parker breaking the relationship, would you have liked to have continued working with Elvis Presley?

JL: Elvis was fine. If Colonel Parker wasn't there, and it was Charlie Feldman who was managing things, then we'd have made that movie with Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley might have turned into someone as fine as James Dean. He had the talent. He was unpolished, he hadn't any real professional know-how. But... Yeah...

Q: What do you think about the royalties that black artists got paid, or rather didn't get paid?

MS: Well, it is true that many black performers did not get paid justly. They were either assigned a royalty that was insignificant to what they were doing, or they were just cheated out of it. Since we worked in that field, when we started, we were also treated as black artists. Restitution should be made to these people. Unfortunately one of the people who does that, takes 50% of the money that he gets back for these people. So it's not an altruistic thing...

JL: It's about 10% less than our lawyer charges now...

[Laughter]

Q: What's your take on Otis Blackwell? Why do you think he never met Elvis?

MS: I don't know, but he was great.

JL: I don't know that he never met him. Is that a fact?

Q: I understood it to be.

MS: I'm not sure. Elvis had so many influences from gospel singers and blues singers, and certainly country singers, I think that one of his major influences was Otis Blackwell's voice.

JL: Because Otis used to make the demos - Don't Be Cruel and so on. Maybe, if it's true that Otis Blackwell didn't meet Elvis Presley, it might be because Otis used to write under two different names, and it might have been difficult at the time.

MS: I will say this. Elvis Presley's name appears on a number of Otis Blackwell's songs. Which was totally inappropriate.

JL: That's it. That's what I'm saying.

Q: Can you remember which song you first recorded, and who did it?

JL: Real Ugly Woman...

MS: Jimmy Witherspoon. 1950. December.

JL: Los Angeles, Shrine Auditorium. We used a 44 Victor mic on him.

[Laughter]

Censorship

Q: Was censorship of your lyrics ever an issue?

JL: One song of ours was banned in Boston, and it didn't have anything in it, but they thought that it was eulogising Hell's Angels. It was called Black Trousers and Motorcycle Boots, and they banned it.

MS: It was also considered a safety song in Chicago.

[Laughter]

Q: Can you talk about working with Peggy Lee on Mirrors?

MS: It's an album that's very dear to our hearts. It was the album we hoped to do after the success of Is That All There Is? Because it has that sort of cabaret feel, those kind of songs. Hardly pop ditties. Unfortunately the record company, A&M, has been swallowed into ever larger corporations, and we wish we could get it re-released. We're trying.

Q: At your charity party on Friday, will any of the original acts be there?

MS: Ben E King will be there, Elkie Brooks will be there.

JL: Tom Jones. We didn't work with him, but...

Q: Did you form The Robins, who became The Coasters?

MS: The Robins recorded our second song in 1951, and they were an existing group, and we had worked with them at RCA Victor, and when we formed our own label, they were a group that we knew were around so we started working with them. When Atlantic offered us the opportunity to work with them and produce records, two of the guys came with us and the rest of them went with their manager who formed another label that didn't survive for very long.

We needed two other people to give us the right kind of voices. So we did form The Coasters, but we didn't form the Robins.

AW: What are you going to do with all the songs in the vaults?

JL: Which songs?

AW: All the songs that are apparently in your vaults.

MS: Well, we're going to put them into musical theatre, hopefully.

Q: Would you consider writing an autobiography?

JL: He might...

MS: I might write Jerry's autobiography!

[Laughter]

AW: Is there any chance of a Leiber and Stoller box set? You talk about all this material that's not available any more, that seems a perfect idea.

JL: There are a couple of production companies in New York that are interested in some sort of biography, and we're still talking about who should write it, because neither one of us are biographers.

AW: Thank you very much. It's been a great honour and a great privilege.