On February 13, 1965, Cash Box, a music industry trade magazine, featured “red hot” Red Bird’s “new teen-beat sensation, a femme threesome called The Shangri-Las" on its cover. Mary is flanked by the Ganser twins, all of them dancing. The group's fourth member, Mary's sister Betty, isn't mentioned. Throughout their brief career, she drifted in and out of live performances and publicity materials, but continued to sing on the recordings. The caption announced a forthcoming album, which would be titled Leader of the Pack after the group's massive hit and the imminent release of a new single.
That song, "Out in the Streets," arrived in April 1965, the group's second iconic pairing (see previous post) with songwriters Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, produced by "Shadow" Morton. Greenwich describes Morton as "kind of hard to deal with at times... He was very eccentric and he wanted total control. He created... little soap operas on vinyl and he got ultra-involved with them, and things had to be his way. But he had excellent ideas, and was involved with some of the most interesting records that ever came out."
Greenwich remembers her working relationship with The Shangri-Las as initially very tense. While she doesn't claim to be particularly innocent, her suburban upbringing on Long Island was very different from the girls' experience on the streets of Queens. Greenwich says, "At the beginning we did not get along -- they were kind of crude, and having to deal with them on a daily basis used to get me very uptight... They came in like you know with the wads of gum in their mouth and black stockings with runs and ATTITUDE. And I wasn't exactly used to that. We ended up having a great fight in the ladies room of the Brill Building one day. I mean they were calling me 'the nun' and 'you're so proper' and all that stuff and I'm saying, 'look at you. look at the animals. you're really not like that.' We're screaming, drag-out fighting. We hugged and kissed, shook and everything was fine... But they were tough, very defiant. Show me. Tell me. Prove it. And I wasn't really used to that."
Greenwich ended up helping the girls understand their mutual dependence. After the blowout, she says, the Weisses and the Gansers "controlled their language to a reasonable level. But, they were tough girls. They really, really were."
The producer and songwriters took advantage of their talent’s toughness to fashion an enduring sound unlike anything before or since. This author believes “Out in the Streets” is the exemplar of this unique style. It begins with voices cooing in harmony -- a lush clarion call to attention.
The girls tell the story of yet another bad boy. While this one has given up his old ways for a new love, "his heart is out in the streets." He struggles to fit in with a different crowd, combing his hair differently, discarding his dirty old black boots, but the girls notice something has gone wrong.
"He's not the same
Somethin' about his kissin'
That tells me he's changed
I know that something's missing inside
Somethin's died
His heart, out in the street"
As usual, The Shangri-Las have to be strong. While they are sure of the boy's love, they also know he is attemptying to alter some crucial element of his personality to win and keep their love. The girls see the whole picture and understand its futility. Wiser than their 16 or 17 years, they describe the risks involved in asking someone to change or attempting to conform for love. What makes the boy so vital is his wildness; his struggle to tame himself threatens the identity that made him attractive in the first place. The girls have to give him up for his own good. They know he won't be able to adapt, and they wouldn't settle for that tamer version anyway.
"I wish I didn't care
I wish I'd never met him
They're waitin downstairs
I know I've got to set him free
He's gotta be
(Out in the street)
His heart is out in the street"
The ethereal harmonies and gorgeous arrangement of strings and stand-up bass pull the listener through the car radio onto an urban sidewalk at dusk. The song's repetitive final verse evokes pools of light under street lamps that disappear into the horizon; the single’s initial “ooh” returns as a receding howl. The best Shangri-Las tunes create such visuals; "Out in the Streets" closes with the image of the girls looking on as the boy they let go disappears back into the night from which he came, like a beloved animal returning to the wild.
Their 1965 Shindig! "Pick of the Week" performance, each on a platform in semi-darkness under a pool of light, recalls this visual. The sequence begins and ends with the girls in the dark, spotlights individually turning on and then off as the crowd erupts in applause. The camera focuses mostly on Mary Ann and Margie who perform slow, sinuous arm gestures, somberly harmonizing the sad situation. The image quality shimmers with distortion; the girls look spectral in shiny black catsuits, just barely differentiated from the backdrop.
“Out in the Streets” is peak Shangri-Las, their most gloriously gothic performance yet. Patches of aluminum white skin emerge from a deep electric blackness alive with tension. They are nocturnal New Yorkers caught moving in flashes through an inky, anonymous night. While they tell a story of self-sacrifice, the feline sway of their presence calls to mind femmes fatales of classic noir. If they don’t release the creature they captured, he will inevitably self destruct. These femmes comprehend the fatal potential of their own allure.
Two singles later, a similar catch and release narrative unfolds on the B-side to “Right Now and Not Later,” released August 1965. The Barry/Greenwich penned “Train from Kansas City,” finds Mary assuring her current man that “nothing in this world could tear us apart.” He just has to trust she will return after ending a previous relationship “in the time it takes to break a heart.” The song includes Morton’s signature sound effects (steam train and whistle) along with a chugging beat hallucinating the locomotive’s unavoidable approach. “The train from Kansas City is coming into town. There’s nothing I can do, can’t make it turn around.” The arrival is inevitable and momentous, for reasons that remain unresolved.
Mary now holds the happiness of two men in her 16-year-old hands. She couldn’t bring herself to break up with the former by mail and must honorably do the deed in person, but it’s puzzling why her current boyfriend should require so much reassurance. The song creates its own strange suspense, ending with Mary on her way to the station while the girls fade out singing, “here comes that train.” Is she on her way to rekindle a lost love or will she return to this one’s waiting arms?
These singles demonstrate how often The Shangri-Las are in the driver’s seat, making the choices that will change their lives (or at least their relationships) for good or ill. What appears in the content of the lyrics is sold through the conviction of the performance. As their singles piled up and their stage persona developed, one imagines songwriters tailoring material for the group, knowing they were the perfect outlet for franker, grittier expressions of young love and loss.
The Motown-influenced “Right Now and Not Later” minces no words.
“Listen to me baby and listen real good.
You know you’re not treating me as good as you should.
Every time I call you here by my side
You have some excuse and I want to know why.
Right now and not later baby,
Right now and not later.
'Cause later may be too late.”
While the backing track sounds like it was produced for The Supremes, that group’s silky delivery would have smoothed out the song’s no-more-nonsense message. Some change has occurred in the relationship and Mary has waited long enough for her boy to come clean. It’s pretty obvious she is prepared to kick him to the curb if he doesn’t fess up “right now and not later.” You really can’t get more forceful than that. While Mary can imagine a number of reasons why the relationship may have cooled, she’s become impatient trying to decipher this guy’s reticence. She’s not a mind reader.
What’s great, though, is how mature she is being:
“If we can't be lovers we can still be friends,
'Cause life goes on even though love ends.”
I mean DAMN! The assertiveness is in the title. It’s a finger wagging in the boy’s face. The lyrics are just a tad more subtle than: “if you’ve got a problem, spit it out.”
Mary doesn’t have time for this mess. The Shangri-Las straight up don’t play.
Beginning in the spring of 1965, The Shangri-Las were signed to promote Revlon's Natural Wonder makeup, which apparently was "medicated, even when it isn't," whatever that means. Mary also recorded a couple of spots providing dating advice, encouraging other girls to make space for boys to perform small acts that "flatter his masculine ego." Mary seems to smirk while delivering these lines. Given the group's reputation, it's hard to imagine any of them waiting around for a boy to take the lead.
Meanwhile, The Shangri-Las put together a band and hit the road again, joining Del Shannon, Dee Dee Sharp, The Zombies, and The Ikettes on Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars spring tour. Joseph Alexander, the group's seventeen-year-old drummer, describes the grueling pace: "On the Clark tours we would be on the road for three, maybe four months at a time -- all one-nighters. At least the tours were routed properly so we didn't have to travel too far between shows. Sometimes we'd do two a day, something like a state fair in the afternoon, and then drive a bit and do a show at night. Four days on, one day off, for week after week after week. We did bowling alleys, halls, dances, anything from four hundred to four thousand people... No matter what the gig, everyone usually only got fifty dollars, even the girls."
Though there was apparently plenty of money being made, the Weisses and the Gansers were at the very bottom of The Shangri-Las' payroll, according to a 2001 "Shadow" Morton interview. This story is common among many of the most popular performers of the period, who ended seemingly successful careers broke or in debt. Most of these young musicians were teenagers when they scored their biggest hits, signing contracts that offered little protection and even less compensation. The "girl group" genre, as it later came to be known, is especially rife with stories recounting the financial mistreatment of teenage girls (most of them Black) who were cheated out of profits that could never have been made without their beautiful, often vulnerable voices.
In support of the large amount of number one hits generated by these teenage girls, the groups were often sent out on punishing tours, trapped on busses and in hotel rooms, many suffering through discrimination in the Jim Crow south, unable to use segregated bathrooms or find decent places to eat. Meanwhile, expenses for every accommodation was deducted from their pay; they ended up receiving little for their labors. Once their moment in the spotlight had dimmed, they often returned to civilian life with nothing to show for their brief brush with stardom, save stories of abuse.
Eventually even the importance of their contributions to pop music history would also be discounted by predominately male critics, the label "girl group" coined as a pejorative meant to ridicule the emotional content and romantic concerns central to the music. As was true with The Shangri-Las, the music's appeal and success was credited to the mostly male songwriters, producers, and record label moguls behind the hits. This early to mid-sixties period has often been portrayed as somewhat fallow, transitioning from commercial Brill Building-type product to the British Invasion and the Singer/Songwriter era, overlooking the fact that "girl groups" including The Ronettes, The Supremes, and The Shangri-Las competed vigorously, regularly knocking The Beatles, The Stones and their ilk off the top of the charts. The history of rock music is stained with this misogyny, filling history's "best" lists with male achievement while minimizing the contributions of women.
This story concludes next week.
Sources:
Betrock, Alan. 1982. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound. London: Omnibus.
Entertainment Tonight. 1989. The Shangri-Las Going to Court.
Fresh Air. 2007. Mary Weiss Comes Back for a ‘Dangerous Game’. Philadelphia: WHYY.
Grecco, John. 2010. Out in the Streets: The Story of the Shangri-Las. Redbird.com
Landecker, Tracy. 2012. Are You There God? It’s Me, Mary: The Shangri-Las and the Punk Rock Love Song. Burbank: Rhino.
Lieber J. & Stoller M. 2009. Hound Dog: The Lieber & Stoller Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster.
MacKinney, L. 2012. Dressed in Black: The Shangri-Las and Their Recorded Legacy, The University of Western Australia. Doctoral Thesis.
Songwriters to Soundmen. 2007. Mary Weiss of The Shangri-Las Early Musical Interests. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.