Not All There Is- Jerry Leiber RIP
22 Aug
Leiber died today at the age of 78 (he's the one with the second most amount of hair).
Today Jerry Leiber, half of the Leiber and Stoller songwriting team, died in Los Angeles. Which is to say, today one of the most important voices in America in the 20th Century died. With Mr. Stoller, Jerry Leiber wrote a list of songs that are foundational to rock and roll. This body of work not only harnessed the raw, hellion energy of early artists coming out of the R&B and Rockabilly worlds, but also were amongst the first to see in rock and roll the potential for real poetry, real art. Here’s a brief list of songs they wrote:
Hound Dog
Jailhouse Rock
Searchin’
Three Cool Cats
Kansas City
(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care
Charlie Brown
Yakety Yak
Poison Ivy
On Broadway
Spanish Harlem
Stand By Me
Leiber and Stoller were the Gilbert and Sullivan of there time; not only zeroing in on the public’s taste and possessing a sense for what they wanted next, Leiber and Stoller said something about what it meant to be alive in America between 1954 and the arrival of the Beatles (whose early repertoire was filled with their songs, a few showing up on record). Cars, girls, freedom, longing, innocent love, love that has tarnished- they wrote for a generation rapidly becoming self-aware. Leiber and Stoller worked with the idiom of Black American music to express something White American teenagers were beginning to feel- angst. They saw in Black culture the frustration, the yearning, the enduring that comes from being an outsider always forced to look in on a culture whose obsession with your subjugation is borderline freudian and were able to translate it into terms teenagers could understand: that the best way to get by is to get on in a way they just can’t understand (luckily empathy ran both ways; the road from “Three Cool Cats” to “Stand By Me” to getting on a bus to Birmingham was probably not very long).
Even if we judge him solely by the attributes of his musical contributions Jerry Leiber is a giant. For what he helped turn us into we should always be thankful. Besides, if he had followed in his father’s footsteps and become a Baltimore grocer, we’d never have this:
