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Leiber And Stoller:
The Bluerailroad Interview
page 2
STOLLER: It was actually gray. It was a gray 1937… It was greenish gray, you're right.
And that main line, "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog," just came to you?
LEIBER: Yeah, it did. And I felt it was a dummy lyric. I was not happy. I wanted something that was a lot more insinuating. I wanted something that was sexy and insinuating. And I told Mike I didn't like it, we were driving, and he said, "I like it, man."
I said, "I like the song idea, but I don't like that word. That word is kind of replacing another kind of a word."
He said, "What are you looking for?"
I said, "Do you remember Furry Lewis' record "Dirty Mother"?
He said, "Yeah?"
I said, "Well, I'd like to write something like that."
Mike said, "You'll ruin it. If you write something like that, they won't play it."
I said, "I don't care if they don't play it, I want this word in the song."
He said, "Jer, leave it alone. I think you're making a mistake."
STOLLER: Well, I liked "Hound Dog." I liked the sound of it.
Big Mama Thornton's version is in E flat. Did you write it in that key?
STOLLER: Didn't write it in a key. I probably played it in C, cause it was easier.
When you say you didn't write it in a key, did you write it away from the piano?
LEIBER: The two of us walked in his house, and walked into this sort of a den, where this upright piano was. And I was singing. I started singing it in the car on the way over. "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog, quit snoopin' round my door." And I didn't have all the lyrics. And we walked into Mike house, into the den, and he walked over - and I will never forget it, the moment is indelibly etched on my memory - he walked over to the piano, and he had a cigarette in his mouth, and the smoke was curling up into his eye, and he kept it there and he was playing, and he was grooving with the rhythm, and he was grooving, grooving, and we locked into one place. Lyrical content, syllabically, locked in to the rhythm of the piano. And we knew we had it.
We wrote it in about 12 minutes. And I will never forget it. He had the smoke from this cigarette curling up into his left eye, and I was watching him.
And he was singing, "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog," and I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah - that's it."
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STOLLER: And we drove back to the rehearsal. Because we had been invited. We had worked with Johnny Otis on a couple of sessions with Little Esther and Little Willie doing duets with Little Esther, and so on. And [Johnny Otis] called me and said, "Are you familiar with Willie Mae Thornton?"
I said, "No, I'm not."
He said, "Well, I need some songs." The procedure, before that, was that we'd get a call from Ralph Bass, who was the head of Federal Records, a division of King. He would call and say, "We're cutting Little Esther tomorrow. 2 to 5 at Radio recorders. Bring some songs." And we would write 2 or 3 songs. And sometimes during the session, during which we'd try to get some of our ideas done, even though we were just newcomers in that field, we'd go out in the hall and write another one.
So Johnny called and said, "Come over and listen to her and write some songs," and that's the way that happened. We went over and heard her and said, "Whoa!" We ran over to my house in my car, wrote the song, came back.
LEIBER: I just remembered - we came back, and I had this sheet of paper. And we walked in. And I think I said, "We got it." And Big Mama walked over and she grabbed the sheet out of my hand and she said, "Let me see this." I looked at her and I looked at the sheet. And I saw that the sheet was upside-down. And she was just staring at it, looking at it, as if she could read it, right?
She said, "What does it say?"
I said, "You ain't nothing but a hound dog, quit snooping round my door."
She said, "Oh, that's pretty." She took the sheet back and she started singing [slowly and melodically], "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog…" She's singing a ballad. She's crooning a ballad.
And I said, "Mama, it don't go like that."
She grabbed the sheet and she said to me, "Don't you tell me how to sing." And she started to sing it again. And Johnny Otis had witnessed this little contretemps, and he came over, and he was getting a little bit salty. And he said, "Mama, don't you want a hit?" And she said yes. And he said, "These guys can get you a hit.
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STOLLER: He said, "These guys write hits. Which was -
LEIBER: Not true [Laughter]. He said, "These guys can write you a hit." She accepted that, and he said something like, "Now be good." Like he was punishing a child. Then he turned to me and he said, "Why don't you perform it for her? Why don't you demonstrate the song?" And I was a little nervous, because there was about a twelve-piece band sitting on a platform - it was a pretty big band - and I was always used to performing a song wherever, whatever, with Mike. He played the piano, I sang the song, no big deal. And I got up to sing the song, and half a dozen of the men - the rhythm section more than anybody else, guitar and drums, bass, whatever - sort of accompanied.
Mike was not playing the piano when I turned around. And he was standing by the piano, smoking. And Johnny Otis said, "What about your buddy?"
I said, "He'll play in a moment. He's just getting ready." And I said, "Mike - play piano." He was very self-conscious in those days and didn't like to perform. He was gonna sit it out. And I almost pleaded with him to play the piano.
The groove she was singing was not right. I said, "Mama, it don't go like that."
She said, "I know how it goes. It goes like this…" I didn't know how to deal with this. I said, "Mike, play the piano." And the groove fell right in, cause he had the groove.
My thought about you two is that Mike wrote the music and Jerry the words - separately - but you seem to suggest that you, Jerry, sort of had the music for that.
LEIBER: Just a road map. Mike wrote the melody.
And, just to clarify, you wrote the melody apart from the piano - you just sang it?
STOLLER: More or less. Based partially on what he was singing, and how I felt it should do. But it wasn't written out on a lead sheet and handed to Mama. We didn't have time to sit down and write out anything.
LEIBER: I think I had the music for the very first line. [Sings] "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog…" And Mike picked that up and went with it, and developed the rest of it.
I am amazed you didn't like the name "Hound Dog," given that it's such a classic now--
LEIBER: The line was not what I wanted. Sometimes you make mistakes.
STOLLER: Thank goodness. [Laughs]
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That the two of you met each other at the time you did, and that you ended up writing so many great and important songs together, do you attribute that just to good luck, or was it something bigger - was it Providence?
LEIBER: Now I look at it different. 40 or 50 years ago I thought it was Providence. Or just dumb luck that happens to people kind of mystically or magically. But then about eight years ago, my cousin told me that my father was a songwriter - he used to write religious songs in synagogue. And then I thought that Mike's aunt was a great musician.
STOLLER: That's something else. It's a genetic strain. But I think what Paul is asking is something else. Which has to do with - from my point of view - great luck -
LEIBER: That's because you're a gambler.
STOLLER: Well, that's true. But in those days, I think that two white teenagers that loved and knew enough about black music to begin to write it and meeting each other -
LEIBER: Fortuitous.
STOLLER: Absolutely. Because you could have come over, and I could have been not interested in writing with you. I could have wanted to write "Floatin' down a river on a Sunday avenue." Or you might have written that kind of a lyric, and I'd say, "What is this? I'm not interested. Bye."
Do you remember how "Kansas City" came about?
LEIBER: I do remember how that one came about. I don't remember how a lot of other ones came about, but I do remember about that. There was a blues with a big band that I loved. And it was one of the only blues with a big band that I really cottoned to. There was one song that I really loved, and it was "Sorry, But I Can't Take You." "We're goin' to Chicago, sorry, but I can't take you." I was influenced by that song, and I wanted to have something like that.
So I sang "Kansas City" to Mike like I sang "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog." And Mike said, "Yeah, I like that, but I don't want just a blues shout. I wanna write a melody to that. I want to write kind of a jazz-blues oriented melody for Basie, or someone like that."
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STOLLER: What I said was that I wanted to play a blues -
LEIBER: With a melody-
STOLLER: With a tune, so that if it's played instrumentally, people will recognize it as that song.
LEIBER: I said, "I want it to be a blues shout. I don't want it to have a predictable melody, some jazz melody. I want it to be a blues, I want it to be really raw, I don't want it to be phony."
He said, "Well, who's writing the music, you or me?"
I said, "Well, I guess you are." So he wrote the music, and it became the big standard that it became.
That's fascinating. With both "Hound Dog" and "Kansas City," you had disagreements about the way they should be -
STOLLER: We've had a disagreement about everything since 1950. [Laughs]
LEIBER: Our relationship is the longest running single argument in the entertainment business.
You are both the same age - so it's kind of a sibling rivalry-
STOLLER: Absolutely.
So many of the famous entertainment duos, from Martin & Lewis to Simon & Garfunkel, are famous for their fights.
LEIBER: I think out of those confrontations come very good work.
You came up with the idea of Kansas City cause you liked the use of Chicago in the other song, so you came up with another Midwest city? Was Kansas City the first city you considered?
LEIBER: Yeah. I loved the sound of it syllabically. Kan-sas Ci-ty. Chicago was good, but I liked Kansas City better. Because Chicago is halting consonantly-wise. And Kansas City just rolls out.
STOLLER: And Kansas City was the center -
LEIBER: Of jazz, yeah.
STOLLER: Blues and jazz-blues.
LEIBER: Jay McShann. Charlie Parker. It was kind of an homage from us to Kansas City.
STOLLER: Count Basie put together one of his first bands in Kansas City and had the Kansas City Seven, which had Lester Young. So it was that amalgam of blues and jazz. And Joe Turner -
LEIBER: It was a breeding ground for great musicians.
STOLLER: It was a lot of history of that kind of music.
With a song like Kansas City, would you finish the whole lyric before giving it to Mike?
LEIBER: Rarely. It was later on in our career that I got accustomed to writing the lyrics on my own. But even then there would be a line or two that he would help with.
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STOLLER: To my memory, it was always like that. Same thing with the music. I would write the music, and Jerry would make suggestions. He'd say, "It doesn't fit what I'm trying to say" -
LEIBER: Would you change that note? He'd say, "No"-
STOLLER: No! [Much laughter] But eventually things smoothed out. I'd say, "If I have to change it there, I'd have to change it there, well, that could work…"
You once said that "Kansas City" came together like spontaneous combustion -
STOLLER: Even including the argument, I would venture to guess that the whole thing, within 45 minutes to an hour, was complete. Including the argument.
LEIBER: The songs that were tooled and worked on for weeks did not happen that way. "Is That All There Is?" did not happen that way, was not spontaneous combustion. "Hound Dog" was. "Kansas City" was. "Stand By Me" was. "Down Home Girl" was. A lot of things were. A lot of the early blues things would be finished in ten minutes, twelve minutes. At the most, a half hour. But other things - the Peggy Lee songs - took a lot more craft, and a lot more working. And I would spend a lot of time on my own trying to get it right. Because I didn't want to waste his time with me struggling with a line that could take me a day or two or longer. Jokey songs for The Coasters, like "Charlie Brown" and "Yakkety Yak," also came quickly, but not as quickly as the blues. They were technically more refined in terms of form. There's a lot more rhyming. There's a lot more acknowledgment of structure.
Did you write the melody of "Kansas City" at the piano?
STOLLER: Yes, I did.
It has been recorded so many times, by Joe Williams, Little Richard, James Brown, Peggy Lee, Little Milton. Even the Beatles recorded it.
STOLLER: I didn't like the Beatles' record of it because they neglected to sing my melody, the way it was written.
LEIBER: We don't like the greatest records, the greatest names.
STOLLER: But Joe Williams, and Count Basie, you know -
LEIBER: -- were killer.
The original version by Little Willie Littlefield, released in 1952, is in D flat -
STOLLER: Do you have perfect pitch?
No.
LEIBER: I do, but I'm a baseball player. [Laughs]
STOLLER: Well, you never can tell because sometimes we would record things in one key and then you'd pitch them up or down.
LEIBER: Presley never did that at all. Presley would sing the song in the key that the demo was in. Even if he had to strain his larynx and everything else.
STOLLER: Because he learned them -
LEIBER: In that key.
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Though the original "Hound Dog," by Mama Thornton, was in E flat, and he sang it in C.
LEIBER: That's because he got the song from Freddie Bell & the Bellboys. He did not learn the song from Mama's record.
STOLLER: He knew her record, but it was a woman's song and he never sang it until he heard Freddie Bell & The Bellboys, who had distorted the song so that they could sing it -
LEIBER: Lyrics and music.
STOLLER: Yeah, both. And that's how he learned it. Though I'm almost positive that Big Mama's record was in D or E. I know they were playing it in D or E. It depended on the piano in the studio, which might have been out of tune. I'm sure it was D or E. It was Pete Lewis playing that guitar solo. And he had retuned his guitar to what was, ostensibly, a Southern tuning. It was not standard E-A-D-G-B-E. It was tuned differently. So I am also positive - it would think E. And "Kansas City" was probably written in C. Because at that time I used to write a lot of things in C, because it was easy to whip them off that way. And that was done by Little Willie Littlefield. That was the first record. He was a boogie-woogie blues pianist. And it's possible that it was in E flat. It may be. We taught the song to Little Willie at Maxwell Davis' home.
LEIBER: He chipped his tooth on the microphone.
Many articles written about you say that Elvis knew Big Mama's version of "Hound Dog" -
STOLLER: He did. But that's not where he learned it.
LEIBER: He didn't do her version.
STOLLER: Her version is a woman's song. It's a woman's lyric and she did it in that way. He heard a white group called Freddie Bell & The Bellboys. I learned this later. They apparently were hired as a lounge act in Vegas, and when he walked through Vegas, he heard them doing it.
LEIBER: It was what you heard from him. Ostensibly, it was like an English skiffle shuffle band.
So Elvis got his lyrics from Freddie Bell?
LEIBER & STOLLER: Yeah.
And it was Freddie Bell who rewrote the lyrics?
STOLLER: Yeah. Or somebody did.
LEIBER: I wrote, "You ain't nothing but a hound dog, quit snooping round my door, you can wag your tail, but I ain't gonna feed you no more. You told me you was high class, but I can see through that, you told me you was high class, but I can see through that, and Daddy, I know -"
STOLLER: "-you ain't no real cool cat, you ain't nothing but a hound dog." Freddie Bell's is, "You ain't nothing but a hound dog, cryin' all the time -"
LEIBER & STOLLER: "-you ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine."
LEIBER: Nonsense! He liked the lick, he liked the sound.
STOLLER: She was singing to a man. And he was singing to a dog. [Laughter]
LEIBER: She was singing to a gigolo, to be very precise. Somebody that was sponging off of her. That's what it was about.
(continued ...)
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