Mary Weiss from the Shangri-Las died on Friday, and I spent the weekend on YouTube remembering how good she was.
I first heard the Shangri-las in 1972, when Leader of the Pack was re-released and became a hit again. I was 14.
I knew it was a “classic” because the Radio 1 DJs told me so. I knew I liked it. I knew enough about pop music by then to know that the death-disc angle was corny, but I loved the girl-gang opening “By the way, where d’you meet him?” (As if that’s the first thing you’d say to someone with a dead boyfriend.) And I loved Mary Weiss’s hard, hurt vocal on the answer.
