The Shangri-Las worked constantly, touring and doing TV appearances until they disbanded in 1968. Mary Weiss was 16 and the Ganser twins were just 17 when the group peaked in 1965. She remembers playing a lot of proms, but not going to her own, describing her life as "a whirlwind... I would go to sleep and not remember what state I was in when I woke up. Because I would do a TV show in the morning, a radio show in the afternoon, and be on a plane to someplace else. That was my life.
"Initially, I loved the music. I didn't like a lot of the things that came with it. I think it was very, very hard in 1964 to be a woman in the music business. Men dealt with groupies and they loved it. They'd invite them up to their rooms. I could beat 'em off with a stick.” Mary believed the group’s tough image “kept a lot of people away, which was really important for survival.
"Plus it was very difficult back then because I truly believe a lot of men were considered artists whether or not other people wrote for them. Women were considered products. And I always found that difficult to accept because rock and roll has no sex to me. Maybe my thinking's screwed up, but I don't think so."
Red Bird, its management team embroiled in increasing discord during this period, wasn't taking responsibility for the teenagers representing its business. Men would show up and announce they were the group's new manager, exit after a few gigs, and be replaced by someone new sometime later. “We were 16-year-old kids on the road in a very tough, grown-up industry. We had no entourage, just one massive 19-year-old bodyguard sometimes."
Mary claims she was often the one left literally holding the bag of cash the band was making on tour (see previous post). "One time, I was in my hotel room and there was a glass panel in the door, and I saw a hand coming through it. We were in a state where it was legal to buy a gun, so I walked into a store, showed my ID and bought a Derringer. I was 16 years old." Having purchased the gun in Georgia, the teenager got in trouble with the FBI for carrying it across state lines. She surrendered the weapon in Florida, but was amused to discover the incident resulted in her mom, who she wasn't speaking to at the time, being questioned by the Feds.
While on the road, the girls knew little about the trouble brewing at their label, which was losing personnel and becoming increasingly cash-strapped. Late in 1965, Mike Lieber and Jerry Stoller, the renowned songwriters, producers, and co-founders of Red Bird, discovered their partner, George Goldner, who they had long suspected of skimming profits, had leveraged his share of the company to cover gambling debts held by the mob. Consequently, Lieber and Stoller, now unwillingly in business with unsavory characters, decided to sell their shares in the Red Bird record label (and its subsidiary Blue Cat) to Goldner for a dollar. Halfway through 1966, they were out of the record business. The last single Red Bird released was The Shangri-Las’ "Past, Present and Future.”
Most of the label's talent quickly drained away, leaving Goldner and his silent partners with the back catalog and few future prospects. "Shadow" Morton brought The Shangri-Las along when he signed with Mercury Records, but the producer got distracted by other projects, and the larger company didn't know what to do with the group. Their career slowed and came to a halt. Due to a number of complicated contractual entanglements that began with the original Kama Sutra deal (see the first post in this series) and continued through the sketchy demise of Red Bird, Mary Weiss was legally prohibited from performing for years.
Mary Ann Ganser passed away in 1970. The cause of death remains mysterious; according to one source it was drug related, according to another it was due to encephalitis. She was 22.
Marge finished high school, got married, and moved to Long Island. Liz "Betty" Weiss eventually also moved there with her second husband. Mary Weiss relocated to San Francisco for awhile, got married and divorced, and ended up creating a successful furniture business in Manhattan with husband number two.
In 1977, the surviving members of the group reformed for a gig at GBGB, the Bowery epicenter of New York’s punk scene, backed by members of the Patti Smith Group. Rumored recordings for Sire Records have never surfaced. Mary Weiss eventually released a solo album, Dangerous Game, in 2007.
In 1989, the remaining trio won a legal battle with an unscrupulous producer who bought the rights to the band's name, formed a copycat group, and tried to prevent the original Shangri-Las from performing under the name they made famous. Marge Ganser died of breast cancer in 1996; Mary Weiss died from heart disease in January 2024.
Red Bird's last single, "Past, Present and Future" sounds like a mournful premonition of the group’s tragic demise. Over an insistent piano loop inspired by Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," Mary speaks of a traumatic past, a chastened present, and an uncertain future. The narrator has been badly hurt, learning to harden her heart against future disappointments. The performance is heartbreaking, a young girl has survived a devastating betrayal that ripped away all illusions, yet still she stands. You can imagine an unyielding straight spine that refuses to let itself be bent; an expressionless face that denies tears, unwilling to express shock or surprise. Nobody’s ever been disappointed expecting the worst from humanity.
Given The Shangri-Las' experience with various double dealing male producers and what we can imagine was an onslaught of unwelcome male attention on the road, not to mention the slew of legal obstacles that stood between the group and their art, "Past, Present and Future" captures the disillusionment that kept coming during and after their short, but impactful career.
This indomitable spirit, how they stand up to the hard realities of love and loss, is why I love The Shangri-Las. Yet there is also a stoic hopefulness that can be heard in their melancholy harmonies. They face whatever is coming; they never run away. You can survive whatever gets hurled at you, while not shrinking from the hurt. They appreciate the necessity of old-fashioned self care: time alone spent licking wounds.
“Past, Present and Future” joins "Dressed in Black" and "I'll Never Learn" to provide a subterranean dimension to The Shangri-Las’ sound, which ranged from feminist to playful, mournful to tough (see "Give Him a Great Big Kiss," "Sophisticated Boom Boom," "Leader of the Pack," and "Out in the Streets").
The flip-side to their penultimate Red Bird release, "Dressed in Black" recalls the caress "so soft, so warm" of a love that is lost. Toward the end of the song, Mary cocoons, as instruments drop away we hear her retreat into herself:
"I climb the stairs.
I shut the door.
I turn the lock.
Alone once more.
And no one can hear me cry.
No one."
While I am sure The Shangri-Las haunted the background radio noise of my childhood, I first came into direct contact with them in my mid twenties when my boyfriend and I stumbled into Rooky Ricardo’s, a record store that stocked mostly singles in San Francisco’s Lower Haight. Our goal was to buy forty-five 45s, so we enlisted the help of proprietor Dick Vivien, who could describe the sound and recount the history behind every disc in his small shop from memory. We bought several Red Bird records during this spree, including “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” and “Remember (Walking in the Sand).” “That’s when I fell for”… The Shangri-Las.
They arrived just in time.
Not long after we acquired the 45s, the boy I loved with all my heart experienced a psychotic episode, believing he was possessed by a demon that had come out of the walls of the movie theater where we both worked. While living together in the double parlor of a Pacific Heights flat that we shared with five other roommates (none of whom knew how to clean a bathroom, apparently), my boyfriend’s situation deteriorated so much his staunch Catholic parents had to be brought in. This was when they became aware of their son’s sexuality. After several weeks of distressing phone calls begging for help I was incapable of providing (not for lack of trying), he was institutionalized. I never saw him again.
While it didn’t minimize the resulting trauma, my little collection of Shangri-Las melodramas offered a strange solace. I had already wandered high school halls with “Leader of the Pack’s” teenage ‘widow’ and released a loved one back “Out in the Streets” for his own good. The Shangri-Las taught me how to survive a great love lost.
"I'll Never Learn," the b-side of the group's first of two 1967 Mercury Records singles (their final recordings), expresses the claustrophobia of inescapable mourning. The image is of a girl alone "thinking bout the happy times we used to have
Now they're gone forever
I still have to wait for their return
No. I'll never learn
I'll never learn
My eyes they burn from sleepless crying"
After this intro, the music fills out and sways, waltz-like, as Mary snatches at surreal images of a "fog that takes the shape of love." The memory is partial, almost indescribable, snippets that cannot be fully grasped. The music makes a circle that carries Mary back to the present where her voice, accompanied by a descending cello, must grieve the loss alone. After a few rounds of attempted reverie that return to the present pain, the song ends with an echoed "help." In this case, Mary isn't strong enough to shake loose from the suffering on her own. I know how this plea feels and also that the help needed never comes. The only people who can understand the pain of lovers parted are the lovers themselves; souls seeking lost mates.
"Past, Present and Future," "Dressed in Black," and "I'll Never Learn" leave us with a bleaker sadness than all the other songs in the group's catalog (well “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” the tale of a teenage runaway whose mother dies of grief, might be a contender). Given the strength of Mary, Marge, Mary Ann, and Betty's output, their obvious potential, their influence on the New York music scene, and how young they were when their career came to such an abrupt and contentious end, we are left wondering what might have been.
The Shangri-Las told the truth, naming the consequences of living by their own moral code from which they never strayed. It is a hard world for those who blaze paths of their own. It’s doubly difficult for female pioneers like The Shangri-Las, who must constantly confront tired gender stereotypes deployed to belittle their concerns and dismiss their talent. How do women contend with so many vampires attacking on so many fronts? The wariness (and the weariness) in the voices of these powerful teenage girls was an essential ingredient in rock and roll’s primordial soup.
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.
Mary Weiss in The NY Times today: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/20/magazine/mary-weiss-shangri-las.html