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Leiber And Stoller:
The Bluerailroad Interview
page 4
It's surprising to me you had eight-track so early on. The Beatles, at Abbey Road, didn't get eight-track till 1968.
STOLLER: We didn't except if we worked with Tommy Dowd in New York. He had an eight-track machine early. I'm talking about, I think, 1958. And there was an eight-track. Like I said, there were only three at the time. Tommy was a genius.
You said that you overdubbed prior to having a multi-track?
STOLLER: Yes. Going from a mono to another mono. The original tape, with whatever was on it, and adding a new element.
And it sounded okay?
STOLLER: Well, it wasn't fabulous. But we got what we wanted!
So many of the stories written about you are inaccurate, according to what you've told me. Another is that when you were asked to write the songs for Jailhouse Rock, you were in a fancy hotel in New York, and you spent the nights partying and clubbing rather than write the songs -
LEIBER: It wasn't a fancy hotel. We were in a small hotel, and Mike was a real jazzaphile, jazznik, and he schlepped me all over New York to small clubs to watch jazz players, the greatest jazz players, and Mike was excited about the whole scene, and couldn't care less -
STOLLER: But we were given a script. By Gene Auerbach, who said, "We need songs for the new movie." I forget what the movie was called then. Somebody told me this that the original title was Ghost of a Chance. We kind of tossed it in the corner with some other magazines, and we were having a great time in New York.
LEIBER: And then they came looking for us.
STOLLER: Yeah, Gene came. [Laughs] And he locked us in, more or less. [Laughs]
LEIBER: He came over to lecture us on fidelity in delivering work, and we hadn't done anything. And he came over and he stalked around the room, and he talked about the necessity of being on time, etc. And finally he shoved the sofa against the door. And he stretched out on the sofa, and said, "Boys, I'm gonna stay here until you give me the score."
We wrote four songs, and one was "Jailhouse Rock."
STOLLER: The others were "Treat Me Nice" and "You're So Square (I Don't Care)" and "I Want To Be Free."
LEIBER: We wrote those songs in about three hours, all four of them.
STOLLER: And then we wanted to get out.
LEIBER: He finally took the songs and said, "Great!" and left. And we split.
STOLLER: [To Leiber] Let me ask you a question: Did we make demos of those songs?
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LEIBER: I think you played them live, and taught Presley directly, cause I don't remember a demo.
STOLLER: That's what I thought! I played them and you sang. Cause I don't remember -
LEIBER: Yeah, I remember. And I'll tell you where the piano was. It was in the right hand corner.
STOLLER: I remember you and I teaching Presley the songs.
LEIBER: Some session was over. I think it was the Jailhouse Rock sessions, and one of the guys in the entourage of mechanics and doers and co-producers and associates came over to me and said, "Jerry, we'd like you to show up tomorrow at 7:00 in the morning. We'd like you to play the piano player in the film." And I said, "But I'm not a piano player. Mike is the piano player." "That doesn't matter. You look like a piano player."
STOLLER: You look like one. [Laughs]
LEIBER: What nonsense. So I go home that night, and my 10:00 that night, my face was swollen out to here - I have an impacted wisdom tooth. So I call Mike up, and I said, "Mike, you're gonna have to go at 7:00 in the morning. They wanted me to be the piano player." He said, "Jerry, I can't do it. I have a beard." I said, "So shave it!" He said, "No." He's always like that.
STOLLER: I've got to protect myself.
LEIBER: He was, "How do you want your 'No,' fast or slow?" But then he said, "Alright, I'll do it."
STOLLER: I didn't say that to you about the beard. You said, "They won't know the difference."
LEIBER: I said, "Yes they will! Shave your beard off!"
STOLLER: No, no. My memory is this. Your memory could be right, but mine could be righter. I went over and they put me in a Hawaiian shirt, and they said, "You start Monday morning, 7:00 in the morning every day." And they said, "Shave the beard off, it's a scene stealer."
And you did?
STOLLER: I did.
LEIBER: The dialogue is a little different from how I wrote it.
STOLLER: Yes, but the result was the same. And that was my debut!
LEIBER: He became a star, and I became a no-name schlepper.
I had assumed Jailhouse Rock was the original title of the film, and you wrote your song to the title. But you invented that title.
STOLLER: There was a scene. We didn't read the script that carefully, but we thumbed through, and Jerry saw that there was an amateur show in a prison. So he wrote "Jailhouse Rock."
STOLLER: The only title song we wrote to their title was "King Creole."
Good to set the record straight. It's been written that you wrote the songs for the movie Jailhouse Rock -
STOLLER: We wrote songs for the movie that became Jailhouse Rock.
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It's was also written you were staying in a "ritzy hotel."
LEIBER: Ritzy?
STOLLER: No, it wasn't.
LEIBER: The Gorham Hotel.
STOLLER: The Gorham Hotel.
LEIBER: Did they mean fancy, expensive?
Yes. Fancy like The Ritz.
STOLLER: No.
LEIBER: The Plaza was ritzy. The Waldorf was ritzy. They don't pay expenses when you do movies.
When you wrote "Jailhouse Rock," did you have a sense that it was a great song?
LEIBER: No, we never felt that. See, you can write a great song and you can end up with a lousy record. Because record production is sometimes not up to speed. As Mike once said, "We don't write songs, we write records."
STOLLER: [Laughs] He's giving me the credit for saying that.
Yet you produced many of the records yourself, so you ensured the songs would become good records.
LEIBER: We started producing in self-defense, because a lot of our songs got wrecked. And we started moving closer and closer to having hands-on producing situations. We were the first independent producers.
In what ways were your songs wrecked? Was it the wrong feel?
LEIBER: Yeah. You give an A&R man a song, and he'll misinterpret it. It'll be like a Texas shuffle, and he'll do a Benny Goodman swing arrangement of it, instead of Tiny Bradshaw or James Brown, or the right stuff.
So with "Jailhouse Rock," you both wrote words and music simultaneously?
LEIBER: Yeah. Most of the blues were written that way. Once I had a couple of lines, it created a groove. And once the groove was in, he could groove with it and extend it, if he wanted to, and that's the way a lot of the blues were written. The cabaret songs were not written that way.
STOLLER: On some ballads, sometimes it would start with a melody. A beginning of a melody. Then the words would come in. In the early days we worked a lot -
LEIBER: Simultaneously.
When you wrote all four of those songs in a handful of hours, did you feel there was something phenomenal about that?
LEIBER: No. "Hound Dog" was twelve minutes.
STOLLER: We wrote songs for Little Esther when a phone call came. As Sammy Cahn would say: "What came first, the music or the lyrics? The phone call." We would write three songs in a few hours, and finish one in the car on the way to the studio.
LEIBER: Tell the story about the Christmas song.
STOLLER: Oh yeah. [Laughs] They were doing a Christmas album with Elvis, and he wanted us in the studio all the time.
LEIBER: Like lucky charms. He believed that. We were lucky charms.
STOLLER: We were in the studio and they said, "We need another song." And we went out into the utility closet at Radio Recorders and within eight to ten minutes we had written "Santa Claus Is Back In Town" -
In the closet.
STOLLER: Yeah. And, pardon the expression, we came out of the closet - [laughs].
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LEIBER: Well, he did, not me. As you can see, I stayed in the closet.
STOLLER: And we came in with the song. Colonel said, "What took you so long, boys?"
So again, no instrument. You just wrote the melody in your head.
STOLLER: Well, yeah. It's kind of a vagueish melody.
LEIBER: It's also blues oriented. And Michael would often, in a song like that, add sort of a touch of polish of a melody.
STOLLER: Well, we sang it to them.
Many songwriters have written great songs fast, but to write four great songs fast -
LEIBER: They're not all great.
STOLLER: We'll let you decide which ones are and which ones aren't.
Do you think it was the pressure of having to write that enabled you to come up with four songs so quickly?
STOLLER: No.
LEIBER: No.
Because the Motown writers and the Brill Building writers had that kind of pressure, and they came up with great stuff.
STOLLER: Well, the Brill Building writers - and they didn't write in the Brill Building, as you know (1619 Broadway) but across the street at 1650 Broadway - they had to compete with each other for cuts.
As did the Motown writers.
STOLLER: I guess so. We didn't compete with anybody. We chose our own productions. The only time we wrote for assignment was when we wrote for movies.
When you would teach a song, such as "Jailhouse Rock" to Elvis, would he do the song pretty much as you did?
STOLLER: No.
LEIBER: I don't remember him copying me behind a microphone. I remember him going behind a microphone, and what he did for the first two or three minutes was crack bad jokes.
STOLLER: He had one of his entourage, also -
LEIBER: -- on the microphone.
STOLLER: -- comedian. Talking like a phony airport --
LEIBER: "Boarding on a 707, gate twelve…" And they all laughed. [Laughter]
STOLLER: And they ate lunch in the studio, too.
LEIBER: He was right about that. Peanut Butter and banana sandwiches. The idea made me ill.
STOLLER: That was amazing to us. We were producing records. And we would go into the studio with the Robins or with the Coasters, and we had to get four tunes done in three hours.
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LEIBER: It was the union's rules.
STOLLER: Because, what was it in those days? Four dollars and 25 cents per musician, and if you went overtime, you know, that was heavy. These guys took over the studio. RCA booked the studio from 10:00 in the morning till whenever… They just blocked out the whole week! So they stayed in the studio, and nobody was worried about them.
LEIBER: That was the only pressure, actually, that we put on ourselves. Because we were just trained, we were brainwashed, not to go over three hours. And to get four sides. And we always did. And we learned how to move very quickly and very effectively. But that's the only pressure. The other pressure didn't exist for us.
STOLLER: No. First of all, we were very young, and we could work 18 hours a day without being concerned about anything, about being tired-
LEIBER: And smoke four packs of cigarettes.
STOLLER: And drink endless cups of tea.
LEIBER: Can I ask you a question? Why are you so interested in "Jailhouse Rock"? Is it that important?
Yes, it is. It's part of our culture. It's one of the most iconic and classic songs performed by Elvis, who is considered the king of rock and roll. When you hear that record, he is alive - his spirit is alive in that performance.
LEIBER: Yeah, that's him.
STOLLER: Absolutely. That's true.
LEIBER: But there's a whole other dimension to our collaboration. We wrote "Is That All There Is?" in three shots, as I remember it. Before it was even recorded, it was part of another song called "Black Is Black No Longer."
STOLLER: Well, it wasn't part of it. What happened - this is my memory, again. Which is pretty good - Jerry presented me with spoken vignettes. And I set them to music. They were all set to the same music. And Georgia Brown, the British singer-actress who had been on Broadway in the show "Oliver," she came over with her -
LEIBER: Manager.
STOLLER: Her manager, and an arranger. Peter Matz. And we played this for her, and she said, "It's great, it's great. But it's all talking, I need something to sing." And we had this other refrain, "we all wore coats with the very same lining," and we stuck it in and she said, "That's it. I'm gonna do that on my television special in London on the BBC." She left and we looked at each other, and said, "This doesn't make any sense." [Laughs] We both vowed to write a refrain - he the lyrics and me the music.
The next day I called him and said, "I've got a tune that I think is really right for this."
And he said, "Okay, but listen, I've written a lyric already. And I know that the lyric is right. And you might have to jettison what you wrote." I came over and I insisted on playing and he insisted on reciting, and finally I won, and I played it. The tune.
And he said, "Play it again." And I played it, and he sang the lyric. And it fit perfectly. We didn't have to change anything.
Amazing.
LEIBER: That is pretty amazing, yeah. That only happened once in 56 years, but it happened.
STOLLER: And there's only one rhyme in the entire piece. "Let's break out the booze and have a ball, if that's all… there is." That's the only rhyme in the piece.
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Does that phenomenon - of having written words and music separately that matched perfectly - give you any sense that there is Providence at work guiding your collaboration?
LEIBER: No.
STOLLER: No, no, not at all. [Laughs]
As you know, many songwriters have said they don't feel they write songs, but that songs come through them. John Lennon said that -
LEIBER: He got that from me. That you're a vessel.
You feel that?
LEIBER: Sometimes.
Had you ever written a song like "Is That All There Is?" before - a song with spoken vignettes?
STOLLER: We wrote "Riot In Cellblock #9" that has spoken parts. It's very different. That's talking blues.
LEIBER: That's talking blues.
STOLLER: And this was not exactly talking blues. And yet -
LEIBER: It was Sprechstimme, it wasn't blues at all.
STOLLER: I know it's not blues -
LEIBER: The closest thing you can get to a model for it is Bertolt Brecht, and that kind of articulation. It's in "The Black Freighter"-
STOLLER: But Sprechstimme is almost -
LEIBER: Tonal -
STOLLER: Tonal. This is just a recitation. It's not even implied to be sung.
LEIBER: Yeah. I tried it. I tried kind of a dummy tune, and I realized that the tune created a synthetic kind of unreality that is so far from the tough attitudes about living I was trying to express. So I decided to try and just say it. But I was afraid to do that, because I didn't think it would be acceptable.
STOLLER: When I set it to music, not having really discussed it at length with you at that point, I said, "You know, I think these should really be spoken," and you said, "Of course, that's what I meant."
(continued ...)
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