Mike Stoller, Elvis Presley and Jerry Leiber

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller: Song Brothers

By Harvey Kubernik

The legendary songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller have just written Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography with contributor David Ritz, who has chronicled the lives of Marvin Gaye, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, Jimmy Scott, B.B. King, Don Rickles and Etta James.

If the two had only written "Hound Dog" for Big Mama Thorton, along with "Kansas City" and "Stand By Me," they would already deserve their place in he Songwriters' Hall Of Fame and The Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, both of which have inducted them. But the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller team (Leiber penned the lyrics and Stoller composed the music) were also the tunesmiths who gave us "Jailhouse Rock," "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care," "Trouble," "Treat Me Nice," "Little Egypt," "Love Me" and "Loving You" by Elvis Presley, "Ruby Baby," "Dance With Me, " "There Goes My Baby," and "On Broadway" for the Drifters, "Only In America" (Jay And The Americans), "Saved" (LaVern Baker), "Drip Drop" by Dion, "I (Who Have Nothing) (Ben E. King), "Love Potion #9" by the Clovers, "I'm A Woman" and "Is That All There Is?" that Peggy Lee hit the charts with. Not to mention the Cheers' "Black Denim Trousers And Motorcycle Boots," Wanda Jackson's version of "Riot In Cell Block #9" the Monkees' cover of "D.W. Washburn" and John Lennon's offering of "Stand By Me." The Spencer Davis Group also recorded "Searchin'."      

The L&S team wrote (or co-wrote) virtually every hot record by the Coasters and their predecessors the Robins?" "Charlie Brown," "Three Cool Cats," "Framed," "Poison Ivy," "Along Came Jones," "Young Blood," "Yakety Yak," and "Smokey Joe's Café."

That last classic of 1950's rhythm & blues, in fact, just happens to serve as the title of a Broadway musical "Smokey Joe' Café: The Songs of Leiber & Stoller" that ran successfully in several U.S. cites last decade and a stint in London.

Leiber and Stoller's songs hardly need Broadway and a booking of "Smokey Joe's Café" to become legitimized, of course. Having been recorded by everyone from the Beatles and the Stones to Peggy Lee, The Drifters and Edith Piaf, their work has stood as the cornerstone of the rock ‘n' roll songbook since -- well, there has been a rock ‘n roll.

As if their rock ‘n' roll songwriting credentials weren't enough, Leiber and Stoller have also written for film and stage, and were also successful record producers and record company proprietors. They've been in partnership for over 50 years, and they're still going strong.


Q: What was it like writing for Elvis Presley? He covered 20 of your songs, including "Jailhouse Rock," "Hound Dog," and another Coasters' song, "Little Egypt." How did Elvis get your material?
Mike Stoller: I almost didn't hear any of his versions! (Note: Stoller is alluding to a boat disaster. He was on a cruise ship and 50 people perished in an accident. Stoller and his first wife reached shore on a lifeboat, and were met by Jerry Leiber, who brought a new set of clothes and was raving about their new hit single from a new singer named Elvis Presley. "Hound Dog" was initially written at the request of Johnny Otis, the bandleader and A&R man for Big Mama Thornton, who wanted Leiber and Stoller to listen to his acts and to see if they could write some songs for them.)

"Hound Dog," Elvis knew the record, Big Mama's record, because he was a student, and, in addition, his first records (pre-RCA) were on Sun records. And Sun Records did the answer version, which they were sued for by Don Robey (Peacock records owner). They did "Bear Cat" with Rufus Thomas. It was a big record on Sun.

And it was a woman's song. Jerry wrote the lyrics for Big Mama and I think we recorded it in 1952, and it was released in early '53 by Big Mama and it was a big R&B hit. Segregated radio, segregated charts, etc. But Elvis heard a lounge act doing it in Las Vegas and they corrupted it so they could sing it because they were guys. They put this rabbit thing in there that wasn't in the original ‘cause the original is Jerry's lyric, where a woman is singing to a gigolo and this is kind of meaningless, but it still has the hostility in the line ‘You ain't nothin' but a hound dog.' Elvis heard them sing it. I think the group was Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys, so he recorded it the way they had done it, lyrically.

Q: Did you see Elvis over the years in Las Vegas when he was performing?
MS: I did. He was big. He was parodying himself and he was poking fun at himself.

Q: What were your first impressions when you met him and worked with him?
MS: Jerry and I actually produced, without credit, the records, our songs in particular, that were in the film Jailhouse Rock. And, he asked for us to be there. We had never met him before. He was a very good-looking young man, very energetic. I mean, he just kept going and going in the studio. He'd say, ‘Let's do another one.' And it would go on and on until he felt he had it. The studio was booked for the day, and we were used to three-hour sessions.

Jerry Leiber: He loved doing it. He wasn't someone who was doing it and wanted to go home, like a lot of people. He had more fun in the studio than he did at home. He was very cooperative and a workhorse. He had ‘The Memphis Mafia' around him. They were his boys. He would be nice to other people but did not interact that much. We met him in the studio. He had seven or eight guys hanging around. He had his entourage, Lamar, Red, his cousins. He traveled with his environment. And The Colonel was smart, he let him travel with his entourage and it kept him insulated. And nobody could get to him, by the way, if you tried to lay an idea on him just because he was there.

MS: I ended up spending a little more time with him than Jerry, because I played the role of his piano player in "Jailhouse Rock," which Jerry was supposed to play, but he had to go to the dentist that day.

Q: What did you enjoy most about his talent, especially his vocal abilities?
JL: I thought he was the greatest ballad singer since Bing Crosby. I loved to hear him really do a ballad, ‘cause there weren't too many people who could do our ballads to our satisfaction. We didn't have people like Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra because we were writing rhythm & blues, torch ballads, and they didn't so those things, you see. They did Sammy Kahn songs, Sammy Fain, they did those other kinds of structures that we, by the way, admired very much and love, still do. We wrote a couple, and Frank finally did one. It's unreleased. The thing is, that was what we were writing, and that's what he sang better than anybody. As far as I'm concerned, nobody cuts Little Richard on rhythm & blues tunes. You have to go far and wide. But Presley was the ultimate for the ballad.

Q: Was it microphone technique? Instincts?
MS: No, it was just his singing. It was singing. Pure talent. Later, when he was in Las Vegas, when he was so large, he was poking fun at himself, and he would do this thing with the scarf, tossing it back to the audience. He would do 20 of those. That was the show. Sure, he could still sing, but it wasn't like it was before and it was clouded by all this show biz. I mean, there is nothing wrong with relating to an audience, but it was mannered.

JL: He'd become somewhat of an imitation of what he was, coupled with some show biz shtick that he thought, and some of his managers thought, and the club owners thought, would go down.

Q: In the 70's did you ever re-submit any tunes to his people after you quit writing songs for his movies?
MS: We wrote a song with Doc Pomus. The three of us sat down together and wrote a song called "She's Not You," and submitted it. We had stopped submitting songs to him other than if we had a record. If it was a good song and it didn't happen, we'd sometimes throw it at them and he frequently did it. For example, "Girls, Girls, Girls" was a Coasters' record that didn't happen like the prior four or five. "Bossa Nova Baby" was a record we made with the Clovers on a short-lived label that we had, Tiger, and we didn't have any distribution, so nothing happened, and we submitted it. And he liked it.

Q: You two guys had three songs on the Beatles Live At The BBC set, "Kansas City," "Youngblood" and "Some Other Guy." On the Beatles' Decca audition they recorded "Three Cool Cats."
JL: Did you read the review of the album in the San Francisco Chronicle? It mentioned who the Beatles owed debts to, and we were the very last on the list, which makes it look real good.

Q: What does it feel like to pen something 30, 35 years ago and hear artists like the Beatles do your work?
JL: I'll tell you what it's like. I have no sense of the passage of time and it's like they cut it last night, and someone said, ‘You want to hear a Beatles cut?' ‘Yeah, great.' I don't have this long sense of distance and time and history and baggage. I don't have it. I think we both experience time and history differently. I think the two of us are in some kinda time warp, because...
MS: I'm in time and he's warped...I've never heard the Beatles do "Young Blood." I know Leon Russell did it at the Bangladesh concert.

Q: How was it written?
JL: That's the only song in that whole raft of rhythm & blues, rock and roll songs that was written in this fashion. Jerry Wexler was taking me to his house in his green convertible Cadillac that he was ready to trade in ‘cause the bumpers were falling of it. He lived in Great Neck and his wife Shirley was gonna cook me this great dinner that night. And he was taking me home. On the way down to the garage to get the car, Jerry said, "Doc (Pomus) has this great title and he's having trouble writing. Would you like to take a crack at it?' I was smart but very naïve at the same time. I didn't know I was being hustled into a thing (laughs).

So I said, "Sure, I'll write it. That's fine." and Wexler said, "When do you think you can do it?' ‘On the way out to your house.' Which is the way we used to write all the time. And he thought I was joking. He thought maybe I sat down at a desk and put on a kind of visor and started making copies of things. I used to write almost everything to a kind of dummy rhythm that I would cook up and yell lyrics. Once I had two or three verses it deserved the yellow tablet, but until I had some of the verses paper was not used.

And I got in the car with Wexler, started singing the song, by the time we got to his house, it was pretty much written. Of course not the melody, but the structure of it was pretty much written. And Wexler was crazy about it. He called up Doc from his house and said, "Sing it to Doc."

MS: We were later sitting in Atlantic's recording studio and we were mixing something else and Jerry gave me the song on a legal pad and I wrote the music. I started singing it and that was it. Doc, and this isn't to take anything away from Doc, who was a great writer, Doc wrote the title. We recorded it in L.A. We wrote it in New York. We came to L.A. and had "Youngblood" and wrote three others including "Searchin'" and went to record on Fairfax Avenue.

I remember that one of The Coasters, one of the original members, was unable to come to the studio that day, so as a ringer we got Young Jessie. And so Young Jessie is one of the voices.

Q: You guys were probably the first independent production and record company.
MS: We were the first I'm told, by guys at Atlantic. We got into that by doing that. In other words, we used to get a phone call from Ralph Bass at Federal Records, ‘Hey guys, Little Esther is cutting with Johnny Otis' band at Radio recorders on Tuesday. So, go to the studio and bring some songs.' We would teach the song to Esther in the studio and we'd have some ideas on how it might go and Johnny was busy doing head arrangements because his band was so tight that he could pull out a riff and, boom, a harmony. The arrangement was written in about five minutes and it was recorded. We'd bring four songs in, and on a break we would go out and write a fifth one. So we got to get a hands-on situation and we learned from watching Johnny Otis. Johnny was a major talent scout.

We learned a lot from watching guys like Maxwell Davis, who was wonderful. I learned about arrangements from Johnny just like I learned from Maxwell Davis. An unsung hero. Maxwell could do an arrangement, and frequently wrote out his own charts, whereas Johnny's were mostly the ones where I experienced it when Jerry and I were in the studio. We'd bring in a song where there couldn't have been an arrangement on it, because nobody could have seen it, and we would teach it to Esther, and Johnny would listen. We might have an idea as to one thing or another on a chart. He could just yell out one riff and the band would go into it in harmony, the horn section would play it. They were so used to working together that it was a fascinating thing. 

Q: I've heard the legendary story that one of your school teachers told a friend of yours that due to the music you were listening to in the late 1940's, you were going to end up in the electric chair. Also, Paul Coates, on a L.A.-based television show he hosted in the mid-late 1950's, said that you were leading innocent teenagers into every negative place. He cited your parody of Brando in "The Wild One," "Black Denim Trousers" by The Cheers.
JL: That came from my third grade teacher. We were into regional blues. Memphis Slim, Smokey Hogg, Bullmoose Jackson, "I Want A Bow-legged Woman." The music was sexy. It was a lot of fun. It was on the radio. I used to work in the summertime as a busboy in sundry restaurants, and one of them I worked with had a lot to do with me getting focused on this kind of music.

I was brought up on the perimeter of a black neighborhood in Baltimore so it wasn't new to me. It was renewed. In downtown L.A. I was a bus boy at Clifton's Cafeteria and there was this Filipino short-order chef who was stoned constantly. I didn't know what he was doing until later on when I found out he was smoking joints. He used to chop food as fast as a latter day sushi chef. He kept the radio going, listening to a Hunter Hancock-type rhythm and blues station constantly and I loved it. I heard a song by Jimmy Witherspoon and knew I could do that.

I didn't know what he was listening to, and he could hardly speak English but he loved it. I listened to that and at the time I was planning to be an actor. I had studied in Baltimore and had planned on being in the production in school. At age 15, out in L.A., I joined the Circle Theatre started by Charlie Chaplin and Constance Collier. I took tickets and swept up and cleaned seats and did that for two summer seasons. I was going to be an actor. And one day I was watching Sherlock Holmes and later schlepping dishes and on the radio I heard "Bad, Bad Whiskey" by Amos Milburn. That was the end of my career as an actor.

Q: I wanted to ask you about Lester Sill, formerly with Jobete Music, Screen Gems, involved with ASCAP, co-founder of Philles Records, and a mover in the L.A. R&B community via his work as a sales manager and promotion man with Modern Records.  I know you guys were very close to him and he was very helpful in your early career.
JL: If you are talking about him in the music business, ‘the era', that's one discussion. If you are talking about him subjectively as a person, that's another discussion. Because they don't come together. First of all, Lester was a surrogate father. My father died when I was five. I met Lester when I was 15 and a half. Lester became a surrogate father, and to some degree a surrogate mother. I mean he was a real momma-daddy. He did a lot of nourishing, on all fronts. He was a man who was filled with an infinite amount of generosity. He was the first to see my abilities. He saw it before anybody. He did a lot for my confidence. He made me. He was the source of my confidence, and Mike's to some degree, but Mike was more independent, and not as dependent on outside factors, outside of me. Mike's mother and father were intact, educated, they were both literate. They were both refined people. They went to college. Lester was the source of my confidence.

He came to Norty's (record shop) one day. It's very simple. I looked at him and said to myself, ‘I've never seen a better looking suit.' He was wearing a brown suit and was head of promotion for Modern Records. And he came in and wanted to know how certain numbers were moving. I worked there, which was hardly a place to be checking numbers, because all they wanted in there was Frankie Lane's "Mule Skinner" and the rest of them wanted "Hava Nagilah" for bar mitzvahs. And he took the time, and he was in no rush and he was interested in people first. And then information. It's not the same.

He asked me, ‘What are you going to do when you grow up?' Which was a real straight-on question. I thought he might laugh at me. I said, "I want to be a songwriter.' And he asked me to sing him a song. Right in the store. I sang "Big Ugly Woman," that Jimmy Witherspoon cut years later. And I did 16 bars and he said, ‘ Do you have that on a lead sheet?' I said, ‘No, but I can do one.' I lied. ‘Get me a lead sheet on that song and I'll get it recorded.' He said ‘That's a good song.'

Lester took us around and we met the little independent record labels. That was a secret world. Modern Records. Aladdin Records, they were in Beverly Hills. We walked up the street waiting for a meeting with the Bihari Brothers at Modern Records. They were late, and Mike said, ‘Let's get out of here.' and we walked up the street to Aladdin Records and sold them four songs. Lester took us to the right music people, the places where they made rhythm & blues. Capitol wasn't. If we went to other labels with anyone else instead of Lester Sill it would have been all over. But he knew. He knew the difference between songs for Eddie Fisher and songs for Memphis Slim.

You know who else knew the difference? He took us later, and was great. He was not the monolithic support system that Lester Sill was, but he was a good publisher and a lot of fun, and he knew what he was doing: Harry Goodman, Benny's brother. He ran Arc music. He had Eddie Boyd and Willie Mabon. They had everything. Lester and later Harry Goodman reinforced our blues vision. Harry was lethal. We'd go into Harry's office on Selma in Hollywood and he'd be in a three-piece suit that cost more than the buildings on the block. He was so elegant. He was loaded sometimes, but he could function. He'd sit there with his feet on the desk. Cary Grant didn't dress better than Harry Goodman. And he's say, ‘Play me some shit, boys.' And Mike would go to the piano, and I'd rip off a song from my legal pad and start singing. ‘Wait a minute. That's a piece of shit,' he'd say. ‘Throw it away. Play me something else.' I'd sing another. ‘Throw it away in the wastepaper basket.' He'd then lean over and then smooth the wrinkled paper with the lyrics that were tossed. I'd say, ‘What are you doin' Harry? You just said that was another piece of shit.' He'd say, ‘yeah baby, but that's the kind of shit I can use...' We formed Spark Records later with Lester Sill and put out the Robins.

MS: Back in the early 50's, like '52 or '53 or whatever, those disc jockeys were banning records and saying rock 'n' roll is over. In fact, around '53, or maybe 1954, Billboard magazine, which was on newsprint at the time, came out in the year-end issue saying, ‘Rock 'n' roll is over.' And I remember Lester Sill saying, ‘No way, man. This music is here. This is going to last. This is going to be here for a long, long time.' He was right. Jerry and I moved to New York later in the 1950's so we kind of separated our partnership with Lester. In terms of the music business, Lester was our dad. The business now is a different game. The business became a different game. And Lester, it's interesting. He was such a sweet man, such a human being. And he kept up with all the changes in the business.

Q: Leiber and Stoller were later partners in Red Bird Records, started in 1964 with George Goldner. In 1966 you sold out your interests. I'll keep it musical. Were you not seeking talent for the label? I know you were busy in administration and in the recent Jerry Wexler book written with author David Ritz, Wexler mentions you guys scouting the Young Rascals at a club in New York.
MS: We scouted talent very rarely, very rarely. I mean, the only act that we ever signed because we heard them live was in 1952, Linda Hopkins, at the Champagne Supper Club in Oakland, or San Francisco. Jerry and I were up there and Lester was up there. We went to this set-up club. They served you ginger ale and club soda, and you paid fifty cents and brought your own liquor. She was performing there. We later brought her down to L.A., and out of our pockets, which were not very deep, we paid for a session and we wanted to get paid back because we had cards printed up that we were A&R men for the rhythm & blues division of Crystaline Records.

Here's what happened. After a while at Red Bird, numerous things led us to just give it up to George Goldner, and turn it over to him, who had helped to build it because he knew how to sell records. We knew nothing about that. We only knew how to make ‘em. And one of the things was that we were bored. And around this time I said to Jerry, ‘If we get one more hit act, we're gonna be stuck here for another ten years.' We had The Ad Libs, Shangri-La's, Dixie Cups, Alvin Robinson. What happened around that time, a few acts came to see us who were waiting outside and never got to see us. One of those acts was the Young Rascals.

Q: Jerry, were you a good student at Fairfax High?
JL: I met Mike when I was still in high school. I was very good in English and literature. That may have had something of an influence on my writing. What you absorb has something to do with what you know. I've thought about it once or twice, and one of the reasons I became so meticulous with words was because English was not my first language. Yiddish is my first language. And one tries so hard to master the language because one wants to be accepted at school as an American. In kindergarten it was kind of funny. Not taunting, but a teacher would hold up a fork and my hand would be the first one up and I'd answer in Yiddish what a fork was.

Q: How did you meet Mike?
JL: I went down to The Orpheum Theater (in downtown Los Angeles) to see him a couple of times where he worked as an usher. I was writing songs at 16 at Fairfax High with a drummer. His name, I think, was Jerry Horowitz. He was a carrot red, kinky-haired guy, a really nice guy. He had written a couple of songs and he wasn't able to make two or three sessions. And I hadn't seen him for a while. I ran into him in the school hall at Fairfax. I said, ‘Hey man, are you gonna write songs, or what?' He said he had to contribute to the family's economic situation. So he said, ‘you know what? I've been saving this for you. I got a gig last Saturday night in East L.A., and the piano player was real good and struck me as somebody who might want to write songs. I got his name.' That was Mike.

Q: Why has this friendship and business collaboration with Jerry Leiber worked so well for over 50 years?
MS: I don't know. In a jocular way I often say because we are both masochists (laughs).