I believe I here mention every Leiber song recorded from
1952-1956 but among the later songs, I discuss only those that strike me as useful
to emphasize a point. Mike Stoller is
marginal here as I discuss only the texts of the songs without comment on the
music.
Rock and roll,
though the genre has always tolerated a significant element of schlock and corn, cultivates its rebellious image. With its roots in the subculture of Black
blues and, to a lesser extent, that of the white working class, rock and roll a
was born with a bit of an attitude. The
very name, like jazz, is a euphemism for the sexual act, and the music is thus
transgressive from the start. Jerry
Leiber, one of the greatest rock and rhythm and blues lyricists, excelled at
witty, subversive lyrics, clever and pointed like the songs of Noel Coward, but
from the point of view not of glittering high society, but of ordinary American
Blacks and youth. Though his songs were
unabashedly commercial, he managed to skewer many sacred cows, in most of his
work maintaining a richly comic ironic tone.
Leiber’s
popularity and his counter-cultural satire go uneasily together. While much popular culture tends to
emphatically reinforce received ideas, creating social coherence by reassuring
people with a set of shared beliefs, some pockets of commodified art designed for
the marketplace suggest contrary attitudes.
Subversive songs often find an enthusiastic audience among subcultures whether
ethnic or sexual minorities, drug users, criminals, or, in the nineteen-fifties,
teenagers who, for the first time, were viewed as a distinct group, likely to
resist their parents’ values.
By the time of his own teenage years Jerry
Leiber had assimilated Black language and attitudes so well that he could
produce songs that played on pre-existing conventions and gave them novel,
often amusing, twists. [1] His first
recorded song, "That's What the Good Book Says," tropes on gospel
themes to imagine Biblical times as a dance party when even the devils are
having a high time drinking wine.
Well back in the days of old King Saul
Every night was a crazy ball
The cats smoked hay through a rubber hose
And the women, they wore transparent clothes
The song was recorded by Bobby Nunn [2] and the Robins
establishing Leiber’s career as a rhythm and blues lyricist, writing songs for
a very nearly entirely Black audience. The
humorous tone that led many of his compositions to be devalued as “novelty”
numbers animates his professional debut.
Leiber’s second recorded song, "Real
Ugly Woman" (1950) sung by Jimmy Witherspoon, proved as humorous and considerably
more popular. The singer turns
upside-down the expected praise of his beloved’s beauties, saying instead that the
lady in question “runs all my friends away.”
She is a “female Frankenstein” with “big feet” [3]. Apart from what Fats Waller called in another
song “her pedal extremities,” she weighs three hundred pounds. [4]
She ain’t built for power,
she ain’t built for speed,
but that woman built for comfort
and that’s what every man need
In spite of her bulk the singer affirms
“Yes, I love that woman, and she’s ugly as can be.”
Having played with attitudes associated
with religious devotion and romantic love conventions, Leiber then turned to social
inequity with “Hard Times” (1952), a belated
Depression lament recorded by Charles Brown.
Recalling songs with similar titles by Ida Cox, John Lee Hooker, and
others, the singer protests the hardships of the life of the poor.
When I had to pawn my clothes
Just to pay my rent
Talkin' about hard times
Hard time oh yeah, yeah
As sincere-sounding as Tennessee
Ernie Ford’s retooling of Merle Travis’ coal-mining songs “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark
as a Dungeon,” also popular in the ‘fifties, after Ford had adopted an
exaggerated hillbilly persona, Leiber’s lyrics deliver a message of protest the
more poignant by being here passed down from mother to son. The singer expects suffering to be relieved
only by death.
There'll be no more sorrow
When I pass away
And no more hard times
In the next two of Leiber’s songs to be
released “Kansas City” and “Hound Dog,” Leiber displayed the fluency of his
appropriation of American Black idiom, a skill which would propel him,
willy-nilly, to the center of early rock and roll. The same year that “Hard Times” came out, Little
Willie Littlefield recorded Leiber’s “Kansas City” (at first titled "K. C.
Lovin'"), a driving song which so perfectly conforms to blues conventions
that it is often taken to be traditional.
The narrative of the song is a typical blues scenario: the speaker
leaves an unsatisfactory lover (“Now if I stay with that woman/ I know I'm
gonna die”) and heads for the sensual
paradise of Kansas City, known as a party town.
In this urban version of Eden, he is “standin' on the corner” drinking
“a bottle of Kansas City wine” with “my Kansas City baby,” presumably one of
those adepts in the “crazy way of loving” practiced there. The propulsive rhythms convey the excitement
of erotic anticipation.
Leiber’s next tune was far more down home
and even more familiar. “Hound Dog”
(“Big Mama” Thornton, 1952) is Southern slang for a man who is dependent on his
lover. The spare lyrics blend a bit of
current slang (“You ain't no real cool cat”) with a hokum-like double
entendre in the repeated lines “You can wag your tail/ But I ain't gonna feed you no more.” The song’s conclusion, punctuated by
Thornton’s cries, mimics the howls of
frustration from a dog deprived of his object of desire.
Though he had written the words
specifically with “Big Mama” Thornton in mind, Leiber found her daunting at the
recording session. She was, indeed,
“big,” and her hard-driving, tough-woman sound ideal, he thought, for the
suggestive complaint of a woman saddled with a no-good man. When she at first “crooned” the words like a
ballad, and Leiber suggested she “attack” it with more energy, she grabbed her
crotch, telling the nineteen-year-old he could “attack this!” [5] After he demonstrated the effect he was after
with his own voice, though, the recording was completed, and the record turned
out to Thornton’s biggest hit, selling a half million copies.
“Hound Dog” was so successful that it was
recorded by ten other artists even before Elvis ever heard of it. Though Elvis had heard and admired Black
musicians, it was a sanitized version by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, a white
group that played a number of rhythm and blues songs and performed at the Sands
in Las Vegas, that caused him to sing it himself. The suggestive line about tail-wagging had
been changed to “you never caught a rabbit” and the specifically Black vernacular
terms “daddy” and “cool cat” vanished.
More importantly, the singer, originally a woman complaining about her
good-for-nothing lover, became a man, apparently, as Leiber complained,
actually singing about a dog. [6]
Despite his disgruntlement about the
changes to his song, Leiber realized that, though he and Stoller had considered
Big Mama’s version to be definitive – it went, after all, to the top of the R
and B charts, selling over a half a million copies and inspiring not only
covers but response songs all based on
the excitement generated by Thornton’s
powerful performance -- pop music might
bring even more lucrative success. The
rise of rock and roll, much of it based on blues and rhythm and blues material,
eased the transition from the thoroughly
bluesy, “brusque and badass” [6] effrontery of “Hound Dog” to thr lighter and
more digestible form he and his partner Mike Stoller were to perfect. Though they had started out “looking to write
songs for black artists with black feelings rendered in black vernacular” [7],
they had stumbled into a new genre which required new forms.
Leiber’s genius for playing with
listeners’ expectations emerged in a series of songs that sparkle with comic
irony and satirical analysis of the pillars of society as though written by an
incarnation of Cole Porter who had gleefully shed his sophistication. The songs’ satirical elements were not always
noticed by their listeners, but that mattered little. For instance, Leiber’s “Love Me” (1954),
first recorded by Willy and Ruth and rerecorded by nine other artists
(including Billy Eckstine) before Elvis’s version, was originally conceived by
Leiber as “a parody of a corny hillbilly ballad” [8] with its absurdly lugubrious
melancholy.
Treat me like a fool
Treat me mean and cruel
But love me
Break my faithful heart
Tear it all apart
But love me (Won't you love me)
The song, of course, succeeded
when understood straight and has since become a familiar sentimental pop
standard.
Some of his songs experimented with other
genres, but these were rarely as effective as the hits which either maintained
strong blues roots or allowed free play to his comic inventiveness. For
instance “Jack O’ Diamonds,” which was recorded by Jacki Fontaine (1954), plays
with formulas in several older traditions [9].
Some of his work, whether produced with Black or white artists was
unexceptional. “Bazoom, I Need Your
Loving” (1954) is an anodyne bit of love-longing in which the odd word in the
title lurks like a code for suppressed lust, the most exciting moment of the
tune. Among his more pedestrian compositions
are "I Want to Do More" (recorded by Ruth Brown in 1955) and “Ruby
Baby” (The Drifters, 1956). Even the
most well-crafted of his straightforward love songs such as “Lovin’ You”
(Elvis, 1957), fail to spotlight Leiber’s unique talent.
Sometimes his touch is a light one. In “Dancin’” (1957) the couple “keep on
dancing” after the band has stopped playing.
The continue to dance down the street, past an erotic landscape in which
“couples parked in cars were romancin',” and “when we reached your door,” “we
kept right in dancin’,” conflating, as songs often do, dancing with more intimate
contact.
Whereas people had before conceptualized
life as a passage from an incompetent childhood to responsible adulthood,
during the ‘fifties, teen-agers came to regard themselves as a unique group,
not only in a vulnerability to tragic or frustrated love, but also as
adversarial to social control. The
problem of “juvenile delinquency” was publicized in films like Blackboard
Jungle, The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause. Just as he had identified with the Black
American experience, Leiber, by now a man in his twenties, learned to
effectively express the social ferment of the new rock and roll
demographic. He paid tribute to the
clothing fetishism of the young with "Black
Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots" (1955) [10] which gave Leiber his
first hit in the pop chart’s top ten [13].
“Hipness,” the subcultural assertion that one is more enlightened than
others, melts in the face of romantic heat in "(You’re so Square) Baby I
Don’t Care" (Elvis, 1958).
Leiber began exploring a different model
for his songs, small comic vignettes he was later to call “playlets.” [11] In 1954 he wrote “Framed” for the Robins, a
highly entertaining song which by the way indicts the racist American justice
system. The singer objects that “I never
knew nothing but I always get framed.” [12]
The humor succeeds because of its irony.
A comic take on judicial injustice, the song is funny rather than angry
as the singer protests too much, and the listener supposes he may not be
entirely innocent. In a lighter teenage variant, Leiber featured a similar
protagonist later in “Charlie Brown,” the high school cut-up who “calls the
English teacher Daddy-O” (1959) [14].
In the scenario of “Smokey Joe’s Café” (The
Robins, 1955), a short story in slightly under three minutes, the diner is
struck with a “chick” who has entered, but others, and then Smokey Joe himself,
caution him that she is taken. “The
Chicken and the Hawk" (Big Joe Turner, 1956) in which the chicken is
seized and carried off by a hawk [15] only to be challenged by a “bald-headed
eagle” sounds like a slightly sinister folk-tale.
The most successful “playlets” were
performed by the Coasters, a group organized around two of the Robins with whom
Leiber had earlier worked. Their first
release was “Down in Mexico” (1956), an atmospheric tune about a Mexicali
“honky-tonk” run by “a cat named Joe” (is the venue Smokey Joe’s again?) who
plays blues. Suddenly he is dazzled by
the sudden appearance of a “chick” clad in fishnets. The location, of course, is arbitrary,
signifying, as border towns often have, the pleasures of the senses. The few words of Spanish and Carl Gardner’s
synthetic accent in the spoken part only serve to emphasize the point that this
is a place where you can “get your kicks.”
That same year the Coasters recorded "One
Kiss Led to Another," a masterpiece
of suggestive narration in which the persona brings “soda pop” and “sandwich
meat” which they never quite get around to eating when he visits with his
girlfriend who is babysitting (and thus unchaperoned). Listeners
had no difficulty understanding all sorts of love-making concealed behind the
final words of the song.
One kiss led to another
And another and another
And another and another
And another and another
And another and another
Similarly, a mother predicts a life of
loving for her son whose “Lucky Lips” (1957) mean, she tells him, that “you’ll
always have a baby in your arms,” an ambiguous expression that allows the
listener to infer a settled domesticity as well as the preceding pleasures of
love-making. While blues songs, rhythm
and blues, and country all appealed to audiences of all ages, the songwriter,
now approaching his mid-twenties, maintained a sharp focus on the target
demographic of teen-agers. Thus, in
“Fools Fall in Love,” when not making fun of the love song genre (“Just play
them two bars of Stardust/ Just hang out one silly moon”), the couple, who
“should be back in school,” are clearly on the verge of dropping out to get
married. “Searchin’” (Coasters 1957)
also playfully alludes to Larry Stock and Al Lewis’s song, made a hit by Fats
Domino, “Blueberry Hill” before cataloguing pop culture sleuths familiar to the
young: Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Sergeant Friday, Charlie Chan, and Boston
Blackie. In “Young Blood” (Coasters,
1957) the singer suffers love-longing and follows his beloved to her home, only
to be rejected by her father with stern words, “You better leave my daughter
alone.”
Leiber’s wit is on full display in
“Jailhouse Rock” (Elvis, 1957). Whereas
“Framed”: had been comic at the same time as it exposed social inequity,
incarceration in “Jailhouse Rock” is a pure frolic. In the carnival spirit of the rock and roll
dance party, the contradictions of society vanish, homoeroticism emerges (“You
the cutest jailbird I ever did see”),
and the prisoners voluntarily remain incarcerated. “Shifty Henry” and “Bugs” are harmless and
colorful characters like the people in Damon Runyon and the Purple Gang, who
brought violence to Detroit for years, is merely part of the colorful background.
In "Idol with the Golden Head"
(1957) the lover consults a magic fetish in his search for his beloved “big
foot May,” [16] only to find her by a creek among empty beer cans dancing “hopping and a-bopping and a-bumping and
a-jumping” to rock and roll music.
“Feeling so blue,” he again consults his oracle, who advises him that
he, too, must learn to “boogie.” Again the
music promises entry to a paradise of the celebration of the senses.
The obstacles to such unrestrained
pleasure appear in the form of super-ego parental authority in what is surely
one of the greatest Leiber “playlets” of teen-age life, “Yakety Yak” (Coasters,
1958). There the singer is told that, if
he fails to do his household chores, “You ain't gonna rock and roll no more.” The nonsense phrase of the title indicates
how absurd the youth finds these limitations, but it is always immediately answered
by the stern mandate “don't talk back,” all the sterner since it seems that the
parents in their time may have seen enough of life for them to know what risks their
child may run: “Your father's hip, he knows what cooks.” To the parents their son’s friend is a
“hoodlum,” one of the “juvenile delinquents” so much in the news. No clearer delineation of the “generation
gap” appeared until “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (Dylan, 1964).
Apart from ambivalent relations with the
older generation, Leiber eloquently wrote of the dangers of love. In “Poison Ivy” (Coasters, 1959), a tune
which Leiber flatly called a warning against sexually transmitted disease [17],
the woman’s beauty is paired with warnings that she offers a threat worse than
whooping cough or smallpox or any number of other diseases. The repeated lines “Late at night while
you're sleepin'/ Poison ivy comes a-creepin' around” suggests the frighteningly
involuntary character of desire, and the concluding section which four times
repeats “La da la da la da” employs Leiber strategy of using nonsense syllables
to signify a sexual experience so extraordinary as to be beyond words. Yet, at the same time, it is poison ivy.
Far more amusing and equally haunting
“Love Potion No. 9” (Coasters, 1959) in which the singer, who complains that he has been “a flop with
chicks” since 1956, and enlists the aid of a gypsy who provides him with the
title preparation. The effect, however,
is not to improve his dating life, but instead to bring him into an erotic
delirium in which he “started kissin' everything in sight,” including, in the
punch line, the “cop down on
Thirty-Fourth and Vine.” The song
caricatures with exaggeration both the young person’s romantic
self-consciousness and the titanic force of libido under the surface.
Leiber’s partner Mike Stoller said that in
his opinion their best “playlet” was “Little Egypt” (Coasters, 1961) [18] about
a “hoochie coochie” dancer who so captivates the singer that he periodically
dissolves into a yammering and helpless “ying ying ying ying.” In place of anatomical features, he mentions
studying her tattoos, reminding the listener of Groucho Marx’s “Lydia, the
Tattooed Lady,” and the song on the same theme in the style of the music hall that
was a hit for the Kingston Trio. After
all the “ying ying” and sexual objectification, the punch line is that he
marries her and has seven children, obliging her to retire from her dance
career as “She's too busy mopping and a-takin' care of shopping.”
Just as Leiber had mastered the language practices of Black Americans
and of teenagers, he wrote a country music classic in “Jackson” (1963), co-written
with Billy Edd Wheeler and originally recorded by the Kingston Trio, which
became a hit four years later sung by Johnny Cash and June Carter. The man’s sexual assertiveness meets
effective ridicule from his wife who predicts that before long he will have his
“tail tucked between your legs.”
Leiber’s lyric sensibility dwelled in the
borderland between the kind of simple alienation that could even emerge in an Elvis’s
tunes such as “Trouble” (1958) as “I'm evil, evil, evil, as can be” and the
hokey sentiment of narratives like “The Reverend Mr. Black” (Kingston Trio,
1962) in which the Christian protagonist resembles nothing so much as a cowboy hero
[19]. The most successful and
characteristic songs feature a trenchant wit criticizing received ideas about
race, justice, and propriety from a perspective that privileges the joy of sexuality. Thus, even such an inoffensive song as “Girls,
Girls, Girls” (Elvis, 1961) ends with the word “girls” repeated fifteen times,
punctuated by a few inarticulate utterances, indicating that the singer is all
but disabled by passion. Even lust may
be satirized, however, as in (Coasters, 1958) in which the singer, dizzy with
desire, declares, “This little piggy's coming over your house/ I'm gonna rock
you all night long.” The ecstasy of
passion is associated with the pleasures of rock and roll dancing. Again, even in a schlocky song like King
Creole (Elvis, 1958) expresses the
liberating effect of rock music in which the performer so absorbs himself that
he (and presumably his audience) is “gone, gone, gone.”
In his combination of mischievous humor
and sensual extravagance, Leiber’s lyric persona resembles the high-spirited
songs of hokum, calypso, and the English music hall as well as recalling
comedians like Chaplin and Harpo Marx.
The closest analogue, though, is found in the trickster figures of world
mythology. Perhaps the most relevant to
Leiber’s genius is the signifying monkey of African-American lore who tells the
truth obliquely and dodges the more powerful but slower-witted beasts. [20]
While suggesting that oceans of delight
await the lover (whether the bed is directly implied or only the dance-floor),
Leiber mocked many conventions of
romantic love, though conceding the strength of others and thus keeping his
audience guessing. The titanic power of
eros is spoofed in the “tail-wagging” of “Hound Dog,” the intoxicated frenzy of
“Love Potion No. 9,” and the “piggies” of “I’m a Hog for You.” The love object in “Little Egypt” begins as an
overpowering obsession, but ends as a harried housewife, while the husband in
“Jackson” strives to break free from his
marriage. In “The Chicken and the
Hawk" the beloved is figured as a prey caught by one predator and fancied
by another. He even played with
homoerotic humor in “Jailhouse Rock” and “Love Potion No. 9.”
Meanwhile, his songs expressed criticism
of religion ("That's What the Good Book Says") and social equity (“Hard
Times” and “Framed”) while expressing a general social nonconformity ("Black
Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots") with particular resistance to the
demands of parents (“Yakety Yak”) and school (“Charlie Brown”). The opposition between an imagined unlimited
pleasure and the obstacles to experiencing it forms the heart of much of
Leiber’s oeuvre.
With the possible exception of Dylan, Leiber
is the most significant lyricist of rock and roll. His enthusiasm for its parent, the blues,
brought Black rhythms and, in part, attitudes to young white Americans in
eloquent and entertaining lyrics. His
work not only contributed substantially to the dominance of the rock and roll
genre in world popular music, it presaged the folk revival that followed in the
early sixties, the blues emphasis of groups like the Rolling Stone and the
Yardbirds, and the psychedelic era that followed. Janis Joplin was doubtless influenced by some
of the same old blues records that had inspired the young Jerry Leiber as well
as by Leiber’s own songs.
This historic contribution is undeniable,
but Leiber’s real achievement is the delight that his play of wit, his clever
rhymes, and his subversive narratives bring to listeners now no less than when
the songs were new. Writing for a genre
that at the time lacked artistic pretensions and prestige, he created a body of
work as memorable as any in popular music.
1. In his devotion to
Black culture he resembled other Jewish artists like al Jolson, Benny Goodman,
and Mezz Mezzrow. Of course, white
people have played a creative role in jazz and blues ever since the days of Bix
Beiderbecke.
2. The singer was
Ulysses B. Nunn, not to be confused with an unrelated Bobby Nunn who recorded
for Motown in the eighties.
3. A venerable figure
that appears most prominently in "Your Feet's Too Big" (1936) by Ada
Benson recorded by Fats Waller and many others.
4. Cf. “Three Hundred
Pounds of Joy” (1963) written by Willie Dixon and made famous by Howlin’ Wolf.
5. Jerry Leiber, Mike
Stoller, and David Ritz, Hound Dog, p. 63.
6. Richard Crouse, Who
Wrote the Book of Love, p. 13
7. Hound Dog,
p. 94-5.
8. p. 105.
9. Songs of the same
title or using some of the same lines were sung by Blind Lemon Jefferson and
Mance Lipscomb, but also by white singers as “Rye Whiskey” and “O Mollie, O
Mollie, it is for your sake alone.” Ruth
Brown did an up-tempo version of Leiber’s song in 1959.
10. Cf. “Shoppin’ for
Clothes (Coasters 1960) or Carl Perkins “Blue Suede Shoes.”
11. See Hound Dog,
96, et al.
12. The same year
Chuck Berry released his “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” who, in a brilliant and
concise line, protests that he was “arrested on charges of unemployment.”
13. One indication of
the song’s appeal is that is was also recorded by Edith Piaf as "L'Homme
à la Moto." Shortly after the
song’s release James Dean died in an auto accident, helping to inspire the
trend of teen tragedy car crash songs.
14. Cf. Chuck Berry’s
“School Days” (1957)
15. Cf. the slang
usage of “chicken hawk” for a gay man with a preference for much younger
partners.
16. The usage derives
from the many blues songs in which the woman’s “big feet” in “Caldonia” or
“Your Feets Too Big” sometimes suggest a comic disproportion and sometimes her
outsized appeal, if not both at once.
17. Hound Dog, 141.
19. Similarly, “Along
Came Jones” (Coasters, 1959) features an exaggerated and thus satirical account
of a rescuer of ladies in distress with the characteristics of a Western star.
He is “slow-talkin'” as well as “long, lean, lanky.”
20. In “Run Red Run” (Coasters, 1959) a late
incarnation of such a monkey is the principal actor. Cf. m y essay “The Signifying Monkeys Talk
Literature” (posted at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2010/04/signifying-monkey-talks-literature.html)
as well as Prof. Gates’ The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.
