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.
At the time, I hadn’t worked out the difference between the various Spector-produced girl groups (they were getting reissued too) but there was no mistaking the Shangri-Las. I’m too young to know how they were received at the time and what their image meant, but over the years they’ve joined Ronnie Spector as the streetwise bad girls of pop. And we girls like bad girls as role models.
Maybe the records owed as much to their producer as the Ronettes’ did. (Shadow Morton has nearly as many wild anecdotes attached to him as Phil Spector, but without the domestic abuse and femicide.)
But then, there was Mary’s voice. Tough, lived-in but so vulnerable.
Over the years, I learned that Leader of the Pack wasn’t even their stand-out record. There are plenty more just as good or better.
Yes, some of the production is camp, but the stories… Stories about girls who know more than they should about sex and more than they should about heartbreak, who have made mistakes, and who still love their mothers. And Mary’s voice made the stories sound real.
Just listen to these.
“I can never go home any more.”
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