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Leiber And Stoller:
The Bluerailroad Interview
page 3
So were you unhappy with the lyric as Elvis did it?
LEIBER & STOLLER: Yeah.
LEIBER: I didn't like the record, either. Mama's record was it. Pete Lewis playing that guitar solo, with her screaming her heart out. That was it. And Presley, he did records that we really loved. One of the best records we've ever had of a ballad of our's was "Love Me" (recorded by Elvis). One of the very best. And he did a great job on a lot of songs.
STOLLER: "Jailhouse Rock." I mean, that's great.
LEIBER: But his biggest song of our's, I think, I feel, Mike does, I think so, too, I can speak for you, was just not up to snuff. It wasn't up to his standards either, I don't think.
STOLLER: Well, I think "Jailhouse Rock" -
LEIBER: Is it.
STOLLER: - is at this point, one of the biggest songs. Bigger than "Hound Dog." Though "Hound Dog" is his signature.
Bigger in what sense?
LEIBER & STOLLER: Sold more.
LEIBER: It's more famous, too.
STOLLER: It's hard to say whether "Jailhouse Rock" is more famous than "Hound Dog."
LEIBER: Not than "Hound Dog," no. "Hound Dog" is one of the greatest performed songs of all time.
Some people consider it your greatest song. People have said if you wrote nothing other than "Hound Dog," that would have been enough.
LEIBER: That is, in a sense, true. The point is, though, the record that is celebrated is not the record that should be celebrated. It should be Big Mama Thornton's record. That's the way it was conceived, and that's the way it was written, and that's more or less, and very much more, Mike's bag, because the rhythm pattern that Mike played that day on Columbia Avenue is the rhythm pattern that was used for Big Mama Thornton.
Did you produce Big Mama's record of it?
LEIBER: Just about.
STOLLER: I'll tell you what happened. Johnny was running the session, but Johnny had played the run-through at his house. He was the drummer. It was his garage. When we went to Radio Recorders to record it, he went to the booth, because he had to make the record, and he was ostensibly making the records. There was no name producer. That word hadn't come into the lexicon in recorded music yet. So he was making the record, and Jerry said to him, "It ain't happening." His drummer was "Kansas City" Bell. Layard Bell.
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LEIBER: Bell. You're right. Again! [Laughs]
STOLLER: And Jerry said, "It's not happening. And you've got to get out there on the drums."
Johnny said, "Well, who will run the session?"
And Jerry said, "We will."
LEIBER: It was the beginning of it. Of producing.
STOLLER: And he went, "Okay," and he went out there and played the drums. We did two takes. The first one was fabulous and the second one was magnificent. [Laughs] And that was it.
And needless to say, everything was cut live. No overdubs -
STOLLER: No. Mono.
So the first time both of you heard Elvis' "Hound Dog," neither of you liked it? You didn't like the words or the sound?
LEIBER: No. Mike was more tolerant than I was. We really didn't like it.
STOLLER: It was nervous sounding. It didn't have that insinuation that Big Mama's record had.
LEIBER: You know what's strange about it? It's something that really is sort of an imitation that never really turned out well. It became one of the biggest smashes of all time. And lots of songs and records that we made that were really great never made it at all.
STOLLER: It's a matter of aesthetics. It's where you live. And what really gets to you. That's really the most important thing. And once in a while you do something that you feel is just right, and everybody else thinks so, too. Then you've really accomplished something.
Aside from the groove and the lyrics, did you think Elvis, on "Hound Dog," had a good voice?
LEIBER & STOLLER: Yeah.
And you knew nothing about him when you first heard it?
LEIBER: No. But when we heard him, I think we thought he was an animal. He had a voice, a range, that was unreal.
STOLLER: Animal in the most positive light.
LEIBER: He would go out there. He was like one big champion in the recording studio. We'd tell him we need one more. It was Take 58. And he'd do it. And he'd do it with the same kind of zest and energy as Take One.
STOLLER: He loved. To perform.
LEIBER: That's when he was really himself. He was very self-conscious. Very, almost always, openly, embarrassed about being anywhere socially or being anywhere where it had to do with his mixing with anybody. He carried his entourage, the Memphis Mafia with him, and they were his family, and they knew him. If he wanted a peanut-butter sandwich with tomatoes on a bagel, they all understood.
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STOLLER: [Laughs]
No bagels?
STOLLER: No, I don't think he ever ordered a bagel in his life -
LEIBER: No, I know.
STOLLER: I know. Orange pop and peanut-butter and banana sandwiches.
LEIBER: But when he was behind the microphone, that's where he lived.
I know that when you worked with him, he would do lots and lots of takes. Did you feel at the time he needed to do that many takes?
LEIBER: He was so good, we kept going -
STOLLER: He loved to perform!
LEIBER: -- he'd improve. Yeah, you don't know when he was gonna stop improving. And when you felt he did, and you got Take 25 or 30 and it was good, we'd often go for Take 31. Because we felt it might be greater. And often it would be. So we'd always go for one or two more after he did a great take.
When he was singing in the studio, would he be moving in the way we now know Elvis to famously move?
LEIBER: No. No way. You mean shake his hips? No.
STOLLER: No. But he was constantly singing. Between songs, he would sing a hymn. He would go to the piano and play a few chords and sing a hymn.
LEIBER: "Nearer My God To Thee." Stuff like that. White Baptist hymns.
STOLLER: He had The Jordanaires with him. And they'd come in behind him. That's what he wanted to do all the time.
Would he ever play guitar while doing vocals?
LEIBER: No.
STOLLER: Once in a while he'd pick up an electric bass guitar -- it was in those days, it wasn't real electric bass - and fool around with it. But usually he just sang.
Would you give him ideas of how you wanted a song to sound?
STOLLER: We'd demonstrate it as best we could. The feeling. And that's what we did.
After he did "Hound Dog," did you like the idea of doing more with him?
STOLLER: Well, we submitted songs. His music publisher asked if we had any other songs that would be good for Elvis. And Jerry thought of this song "Love Me" that we had recorded with this black duet, Willie & Ruth, and then had been picked up and recorded by a dozen other people, including Billy Eckstein. None of them were hits. And Jerry remembered the song, and it was submitted, and he did a fantastic job on it.
So you were happy with that one.
LEIBER: Oh yeah.
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STOLLER: Very. And then they asked us to write songs for the movie. We did "Loving You" and then "Jailhouse Rock." Then we were informed that he wanted us to be in the studio. Because he knew the records that we were making.
LEIBER: He was a fan of our's. In fact, he was a fan of our's before he started making records for Sun Records and Sam Phillips. He knew what we did.
To write the songs for the film Jailhouse Rock, I understand you went to New York -
STOLLER: Well, we didn't go to New York for that purpose. We went to New York because we had started making records for Atlantic Records. And we also had some notions about writing for theater.
LEIBER: Actually, we went to New York because Nesuhi Ertegün had discovered us in L.A. and he liked the stuff we were doing, and he realized that we were making records at that point for our own label with Lester Sill. And were making records like "Riot In Cellblock #9" and other songs. And they used to get very good reviews in the trade papers but they never really sold very much.
STOLLER: Not outside of L.A. Cause we didn't have any promotion.
LEIBER: Nesuhi approached us and said, "You know, you're making great records. But you're not gonna sell them cause you don't know how to merchandise records." He asked questions about who we had doing promotion, who we had taking records to the radio stations. We didn't have anybody doing anything. We thought all you needed was to make a record and send it to 25 or 30 disc jockeys and that was it. Well, of course, that wasn't it. And he talked to us about going to Atlantic. And I thought of an idea that might work for us. And something I wanted to do very much. And I talked to him about it and he wasn't sure we could do that, but he thought if we made records for Atlantic, they would put them out and distribute them.
Mike and I finally talked it over and decided to ask the guys at Atlantic to consider us producers since we were in the studio making the records. And in many cases, Mike was making the arrangement. In many cases, I was directing the rhythm section. They fought like tigers to keep us from getting credit on the label. It had never been given to anybody else.
STOLLER: Actually, they came up with the title "producer." We didn't invent that title.
LEIBER: How did we get it? I was fighting with Jerry Wexler.
STOLLER: Yes we were.
LEIBER: Or was it just about money?
STOLLER: No! It was about some kind of credit. For making the record.
LEIBER: Oh, I know, I know.
STOLLER: Finally, when they agreed, they came up with the name "Produced by." Because I would have thought "Directed by" would have been more appropriate.
LEIBER: That's what I was gonna say right now. That we came up with "Directed by," and they didn't buy it for whatever reason. I think it sounded too consummate -
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STOLLER: That may have been so. All I remember is saying we wanted credit, and they finally gave in, cause they said, "Man, how many times do you want your name on the record? You wrote the song. We tell Waxy Maxy in Washington, the distributor, we told him you made the record." [Laughs]
So you were the first official, designated record producers.
STOLLER: As far as I know.
LEIBER: With credit.
STOLLER: Independent record producers.
LEIBER: There was Buck Ram, who was making records for The Platters. He was making records at the same time. I just remembered that. I haven't remembered that in forty years.
STOLLER: But he didn't have a producer credit.
LEIBER: There was no credit. There was no credit at all.
Was there any name for the person doing that job?
STOLLER: The A&R man.
LEIBER: But he never got label credit.
STOLLER: That's true.
LEIBER: The A&R man -
STOLLER: -- was a hired -
LEIBER: -- producer, actually.
STOLLER: In effect, a producer. But in some cases, they selected the song. Then they called the take numbers. They hired an arranger, and frequently that was it. They hired an arranger, and they selected a song for the artist. What we were doing, because we were writing and we wanted to protect the intention that we had when we wrote the song, was outline - not only teaching how to sing, which Jerry frequently did by demonstrating over and over certain phrases, and I would write and arrangement, and frequently I would play the piano on those early sessions. I played on all of those Coasters records -
LEIBER: Nobody could ever play like Mike could. And there were wizard piano players. But they never got the feel.
STOLLER: I was not a wizard piano player. I'm still not. Apparently I had the feel for the songs that we were writing. Especially at that time.
I never understood why the name 'producer' for records was chosen, as a record producer, of course, is much different than a movie producer.
STOLLER: It should have been `director.'
LEIBER: That's why I came up with `director.' I was looking for a word they might accept. And then they refused to use the word 'director.' I put a lot of pressure on Jerry Wexler. And to some degree we both intimidated him. We got to a point where we more or less stood our ground and we indicated that if we couldn't get a credit and a royalty - we wanted a two cent royalty - they didn't want to give us either, but then they gave in, and we got the royalty -
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STOLLER: They gave us a royalty?
LEIBER: It wasn't two cents?
STOLLER: It was two cents, but then after that we wanted three. And we went up to three.
LEIBER: Mike is right. And they gave us producers credit. And we went from there.
STOLLER: And we made their first million-selling single, which was "Searching" and "Youngblood" [performed by The Coasters].
LEIBER: "Searching" was designed to be the b-side and it became a big hit. "Youngblood" was a big hit, too, but nothing compared to "Youngblood."
And you would completely produce the sessions-
STOLLER: Between the two of us -
LEIBER: Between the two of us we did everything.
STOLLER: Including the mastering. In fact, even before there was multi-track, we were doing overdubs. When we had to. And cutting an 's' off a word because it wasn't supposed to be there. Because in those days you couldn't reach into one track and adjust it. There was only everything.
LEIBER: We used to do it with [engineer and producer] Tommy Dowd, who was a wizard, at Atlantic.
STOLLER: Well, first we did it here, with [engineer] Bunny Robine. At Master Recorders.
LEIBER: On Fairfax. Right across the street from my high school.
STOLLER: But with Tommy, we had a major advantage, because Tommy had -
LEIBER: -- a four-track machine.
STOLLER: Eight.
You had eight-track?
LEIBER: Not the first one.
STOLLER: Yeah. Guarantee it. Three people had an eight-track machine. Tommy Dowd, Les Paul and the U.S. Navy.
LEIBER: I remember that Tommy had, by himself, a four-track machine for six or eight months, and then he graduated to an eight-track machine.
STOLLER: Well, when I worked with him, that I recall, he had a small studio - 234 West 56th Street, top of an old brownstone building. My memory of it was that working there with The Coasters was with an eight-track machine. But we didn't do any of that stuff where you start with the bass and drums and then add a guitar. We did everybody at the same time, but we had the ability to make little adjustments. And we had the ability to have the group, or the lead singer, sing four or five bars, or do a whole performance again. We'd pick the best stuff.
But you wouldn't overdub the lead vocal, you would do it live.
STOLLER: Oh absolutely, it would have to be.
(continued ...)
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