Don't by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller

Just found this clip, below, on youtube of Dave Gilmour's beautiful performance of Don't, the song associated with Elvis Presley, from the 2001 Leiber and Stoller concert at Hammersmith Apollo. Read my review of the show here.

Jerry Leiber

Very sad to read that Jerry Leiber (above, left) is dead.

Click here for a link to a 2001 interview with Leiber and Stoller at the NFT to promote a documentary about their work. I remember it well because I was present and even got to ask a question. It covers most bases and is well worth reading in full. Below are some brief extracts.

But if you're in a hurry, what with your busy schedule and lack of any sense of musical history, the gist is: they put in the hours and we all benefited.

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?

Stand by him

As a footnote to the posts about Stand By Me, two youtube clips with a bearing on my comments about seeing Ben E King with the Drifters in the eighties.

Yes, I remember Doc and old "Beat Me Daddy" Slack. It was late June. Or The Imperfect Enjoyment

As promised, both sides of the rock'n'roll-anticipating 78 found in my grandfather's attic in the early seventies and presumably once prized by him. I don't know whether John R.T. Davies ever got his hands on a copy of this record , but having heard several CD transfers and listened to the BBC's copy on a record request programme I can say that the sound you will hear below is better than average. A CD I had of Bradley/McKinley sides had certain frequencies boosted, resulting in trebly, prominent vocals but no bottom. You've got to have a bottom.

Stand By Me - Part One

I can't remember when I first heard Stand By Me. It may even have been the Lennon reworking, as my earliest definite memory is of dancing to his version during one of the regular rock'n'roll nights at Tiffany's, Glasgow, in 1975, the enduring Rollin' Joe reassuring us (or himself): "John Lennon's coming home."

Stand By Me - Part Two

By the mid to late 50s, artists like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke were beginning to realise there was a lot to learn from the stripped down language of gospel songs as well as the singing which McPhatter had already introduced to a wider audience. They developed a new kind of music, with words cut to the bone, giving the singer space to linger over them, put more of himself into the performance: what was to become known as soul music.

Some say that There Goes My Baby is the first soul record; others go back to Ray Charles' I Got a Woman (1954), based on a gospel song; Charlie Gillett (author of the first serious study of Rock'n'Roll, The Sound of the City) has pointed out that the horns on this record are effectively doing the job of backing singers in a gospel quartet.

A Tribute to Leiber and Stoller

I was there when this concert, taking in all the Leiber and Stoller classics, and billed as something like "the indoor event of the year" was recorded at Hammersmith Apollo in July 2001. It's a mixed bag but the backing musicians (inc Pete Wingfield and Mick Green) do not seem underrehearsed, if I can put it like that: crustacean posteriors spring to mind. At a certain amount of fathoms. Very possibly not less than fifty.

Okay, facetiousness over. The singers fronting the orchestra, a different one for every song, are a mixed bunch: soap actors singing Trouble I can do without. But there's Ben E King singing Stand By Me, forty years on (and unlike any other singer, from Lennon downwards, not copying the phrasing on the original recording), which is a moving experience even if his rich baritone is not what it was (on the night I thought the mike was faulty); as I was about to give a valedictory school assembly on that song, the concert is forever associated - for me, anyway - with imminent liberation.



Other highlights are Dave Gilmour's version of Don't, not aping Elvis but singing, in a quiet, understated yet wholly convincing way; the guitar solo feels an extension of the singing and the whole is magical. (Not so Leo Sayer's take on Chuck Jackson's I Keep Forgetting: he reads the words, suggesting he forgot that he was advertised as being on the bill some weeks in advance - and it's a pity they didn't get Tom Jones onto that one. Or anyone else, really...) Ruby Turner does Falls Fool in Love (not the Frankie Lymon song but a number recorded by the original, Clyde McPhatter era, Drifters) against a great arrangement that seems half ska, half the more familiar lazy, lolloping New Orleans beat (though I know that ska derives from New Orleans rhythms) which seems a perfect replacement for the, I'd say, knowingly corny arrangement in the original Drifters version (I think Dave Marsh, in The Heart of Rock and Soul, says it sounds like an Irving Berlin number) and Sally Kellerman, accompanied by Mike Stoller on the piano, does Is That All There Is? justice. On the night, some people in front of me chose halfway through that song to get up for a comfort stop, so this recording is some kind of a consolation.

Too often, though, the names are not big enough, or not serious enough, or not American enough, to give these songs what they deserve. Mark Lamarr may love this sort of music but he can't give Framed the comic gravitas, if that makes sense, that the song needs. But it's well worth going through the whole DVD because you get such a range of performers and with Mike "Cue the music!" Mansfield at the helm, it's well recorded with what appears to be about twenty cameras (he seems particularly fond of drawing our attention to the young, hardworking drummer, and captures moments of delight on Pete Wingfield's face - as well he might, as this keyboard wizard has made a speciality of backing rock'n'roll acts). Tom Jones and Edwin Starr tear into Jailhouse Rock and Baby, That is Rock and Roll respectively, but it's Ben E King I will remember, singing his song afresh, and radiating dignity - odd to think the universe can hold him AND Leo Sayer ...


Go to the BFI site, here, for the transcribed interview which took place at the NFT a couple of days before the Hammersmith gig; Leiber and Stoller were attending a screening of the documentary about them in the Songmakers Collection DVD set. It's a very full interview and it's usefully given subheadings:

The Backrooom Boys
Modern Records
Elvis
Atlantic
Red Bird
Payola
Listen to the lyrics
Censorship

Mine is the first question in the audience Q&A because one of them had casually mentioned that they had about half an hour to spare in a session so decided to do Stand By Me; for a moment I thought they had been implying it was all a happy accident. But elsewhere in the Q&A someone asked if they treated their job like a 9 to 5 thing and the answer - how could it be otherwise, when you think of their achievement? - was that they "wrote and planned records for about eighteen hours every day, in our office or in our homes."

In the documentary Ben E King modestly disclaiming his own part in the records' success, likens singing different Leiber and Stoller's songs to the pleasure of wearing and enjoying different suits. I can't recall the source but I think I remember his saying on another occasion that the songwriting team basically just added the opening riff to Stand By Me, which was otherwise by him (a thorny question which may necessitate my finding and revising the information in that farewell assembly) but there was no rancour: he recognised that that made the record.

The Songmakers Collection is a series of five interconnected documentaries about Brill Building writers and performers. In addition to the programme entitled Words and Music by Leiber and Stoller, there are programmes on Bobby Darin, Burt Bacharach, Dionne Warwick and one entitled The Hitmakers, which features interviews with Goffin and King, Mann and Weil (plus clips of performers including the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers). It's a while since I've actually watched all the programmes so I can't give a blow by blow account but I think that the four are interviewed together, so there is that additional poignancy of time passing to which I referred in the Always Magic in the Air review - in fact I think Ken Emerson drew on these documentaries. Each lasts about fifty five minutes and the most useful thing I can say is they feel substantial. They can be bought together relatively inexpensively.