Super 60's Tune for Friday, July 10th, '09

"Leader of the Pack" was a teenage melodrama in spoken word and song, a kind of miniature James Dean movie for the ears. A girl tells the sad story of her brief relationship with a leather-jacketed, motorcycle-riding hood tellingly named Jimmy and how he (sob!) gets killed in an automobile accident on a rainy night just after she follows her father's orders and breaks up with him. It was sung by the Shangri-Las -- two sets of teenage sisters from Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, NY, Mary and Betty Weiss and Mary Ann and Marge Genser -- and produced and written by George "Shadow" Morton, Jeff Barry, and Ellie Greenwich for Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's Red Bird Records. (It has long been suggested that the pianist on the track is a young Billy Joel.) Leiber and Stoller had specialized in comic story-songs for the Coasters in the '50s, and "Leader of the Pack" struck a lot of people as pretty funny, even if lead singer Mary Weiss can be heard crying on the record. Being a novelty didn't hurt its commercial chances, however, and when it followed the Shangri-Las' first hit, "Remember (Walking in the Sand)," in the fall of 1964, it went all the way to number one. The original record, with its realistic sound effects of a motorcycle revving and the sickening crash that took poor Jimmy's life, was inseparable from the song, and while it was heavily anthologized, nobody tried covering it until the fearless Bette Midler put it on her 1972 debut album, The Divine Miss M. In 1984, a revue of Ellie Greenwich songs called Leader of the Pack was mounted off-Broadway, followed by a Broadway production that opened in April 1985 and ran for 120 performances, long enough to spawn a cast album. "Leader of the Pack" is a highly theatrical song, of course, and it was good that it finally made it to the stage.