When the mid-60s oeuvre of the Shangri-Las is discussed, attention often focusses on the input of their producer, George “Shadow” Morton. You can see why. From the moment you dropped the needle on the New York City girl group’s first hit, 1964’s Remember (Walking in the Sand), Morton’s production style was hard to ignore. Working, so he claimed, without any experience or musical ability, he was not a man at home with subtlety or good taste. He drenched everything in echo and slathered on dramatic sound effects: screaming gulls and crashing waves, thunderclaps, the whistle and clatter of departing trains, the squeal of tyres and the crunch of vehicles colliding at speed.
Perhaps Morton thought you needed to stand out in a US pop world that had just been turned on its head – Remember (Walking in the Sand) was recorded a few months after the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and released into a Hot 100 where the British invasion was in full swing: six singles by the Beatles, two by the Rolling Stones and the Dave Clarke 5, hits for the Searchers, the Animals, Cilla Black and Dusty Springfield – in which case his plan worked. Remember (Walking in the Sand) was the first in a string of Shangri-Las hits over the next two years.
But the Shangri-Las’ de facto leader, Mary Weiss, who sang lead on all but one of the band’s hits, managed to stand out amid the sonic bedlam. She and her bandmates – her sister Betty and identical twins Marge and Mary Ann Ganser – had been discovered singing together at talent shows and school hops in the city, but it wasn’t until they hooked up with Morton that their singles clicked.
Weiss was 15 when Remember (Walking in the Sand) was recorded, and looked rather sweet: blonde and possessed of an “angelic little face”, as songwriter Ellie Greenwich put it. But her voice told a different story. It was hard and piercing and a little nasal, a sound capable of cutting through Morton’s more-is-more productions. It was audibly the product of Queens (“I’m wokkin’ out that dohr!” she cries on Never Again), albeit a nicer neighbourhood than you might have imagined from listening to her.
She had quite an emotional range – distraught on Never Again, stoical on The Train from Kansas City, sweetly lovestruck on Heaven Only Knows, consumed with lust at the end of Give Him a Great Big Kiss – but always sounded tough and streetwise: far from the matching gowns worn by her fellow girl groups, you somehow got the feeling she might be chewing gum or filing her nails as she sang. Perhaps that lent her voice a certain realism that accounts for the emotional impact of the Shangri-Las’ singles.
The arrangements were high camp and the lyrical teen melodramas could become faintly ridiculous – on 1965’s Give Us Your Blessings, a lovestruck couple meet their end in a car crash, so blinded by tears at their parents’ refusal to let them marry that they don’t see a road-closed sign – but they almost always packed an emotional punch regardless. They were, the critic Greil Marcus once noted, “records [that] left wounds in their listeners”: Amy Winehouse called their 1965 single I Can Never Go Home Anymore “the saddest song in the world”.
Certainly, Weiss’s voice was the perfect vehicle for the Shangri-Las’ oeuvre, in which parents were defied, unsuitable boyfriends were relentlessly pursued (“he’s good-bad, but he’s not evil,” shrugged Weiss in response to an inquiry about her sweetheart’s character on Give Him a Great Big Kiss) and people died horribly: usually, although not always, in road accidents. “Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!” screamed Weiss as biker beau Jimmy sped angrily off into the night, and to a grisly fate, on their extraordinary 1964 No 1 Leader of the Pack: should anyone have wondered what exactly became of him, Morton was on hand with his sound effects to underline the point.
They weren’t the first girl group to lust after a wrong ’un – the Crystals had a huge hit with He’s a Rebel in 1962 – nor the first to suggest they were rather more steely and tough than the matching outfits suggested: the Angels’ New Jersey-born vocalist Peggy Santiglia sounded not unlike Weiss on 1963’s My Boyfriend’s Back, the perfect fit for a song that essentially spends two minutes warning someone that the titular boyfriend is going to beat the shit out of them. But the Shangri-Las made parent-baiting toughness their raison d’être, shifting the dial of what was permissible from girls in pop in the process.
Their bad boys weren’t really misunderstood like the hero of He’s a Rebel, they were attractive precisely because they were bad. “Dirty fingernails!” Weiss sings, delighted on Give Him a Great Big Kiss. “Oh boy, what a prize!” Their worldview might be best summed up by 1965’s Out in the Streets, a big ballad on which Weiss announces that her love has tamed her former gang-member boyfriend. Rather than express satisfaction at this turn of events, she’s distraught: “He don’t do the wild things that he did before,” she complains. “He don’t wear those dirty old black boots no more … I wish I’d never met him.”
There’s something telling about the fact that their hit-making career drew to an end with 1966’s Long Live Our Love, on which they were required to salute a boyfriend conscripted to fight in Vietnam to the strains of When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again: “Something’s come between us and it’s not another girl / But a lot of people need you – there is trouble in the world.” It wasn’t just that releasing a patriotic, ostensibly pro-war song was a questionable idea in 1966, although it was: the anti-war movement and the counterculture alike were burgeoning. It was that the song seemed so antithetical to the image the Shangri-Las had built up over the preceding couple of years: the lyrics, the leather outfits, the stories about Weiss carrying a gun, or getting in a fight with police after using a bathroom designated for black women at a segregated Texas venue where they were supporting James Brown, or indeed about Marvin Gaye being nearly brained backstage at Brooklyn’s Fox theatre after wandering out of his dressing room straight into the Shangri-Las “letting off steam” by throwing crockery at each other. What were they doing meekly waving their sweetheart off, rather than smuggling him across the border to Canada? And who was this sweetheart anyway? Surely The Shangri-Las should have been drooling after a long-haired draft-card-burner?
Whatever the reason, that was more or less it for their career, although they had one more extraordinary record in them. Essentially a spoken-word monologue with a musical accompaniment based on Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Past, Present and Future could be read as yet another song about a failed teenage romance, but between the portentous strings and Weiss’s soft, understated delivery lurks the implication that the problem isn’t merely being dumped, that something far worse has happened to the protagonist: “Take a walk along the beach tonight? / I’d love to / But don’t try to touch me / Don’t try to touch me / Because that will never happen again.”
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Perhaps understandably, a song that seemed to suggest its protagonist had been abused or raped failed to restore their fortunes and the Shangri-Las faded away: Weiss eventually went to work for an architectural firm. But their music declined to follow suit, despite presumably being intended as no more than disposable teen pop. The Leader of the Pack was a hit again in the UK in 1972, and again four years later. Not entirely unpredictably, they became the girl group of choice among the denizens of proto-punk and punk itself. The New York Dolls swiped Weiss’s sneering spoken-word intro to Give Him a Great Big Kiss – “when I say I’m in love, you best believe I’m in love – L-U-V” – for the opening of 1973’s Looking for a Kiss and, disastrously, employed Shadow Morton as the producer of their second album, Too Much Too Soon. The first British punk single, New Rose by the Damned, began with singer Dave Vanian asking: “Is she really going out with him?”, a line stolen from the spoken-word intro of Leader of the Pack. Their influence hung over Blondie, who covered Out in the Streets, and paid homage to their sound on their debut single, X Offender.
Indeed, punk-era interest led to a brief Shangri-Las reformation – they played a solitary gig at CBGBs, backed by a band that included Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye, and started work on a new album which was left unfinished. Nevertheless, by the mid-80s, they were being hailed as an influence by the Jesus and Mary Chain and covered by glam metal band Twisted Sister. Amy Winehouse was a huge fan – interpolating live performances of Back to Black with lines from Remember (Walking in the Sand) – and so, apparently, were Abba: Agnetha Fältskog covered Past, Present and Future on her 2004 album My Colouring Book. In fact, Shangri-Las fandom is the linking factor between some unlikely artists: Lana Del Rey, Sonic Youth and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour; Bette Midler and Belle and Sebastian.
Eventually Weiss broke cover, releasing a well-received solo album, Dangerous Game, in 2007. She gave a few interviews, which didn’t reveal much – journalists struggled to square the middle-class professional they met with the voice of Out in the Streets or Give Him a Great Big Kiss. Perhaps it was an act all along, but it doesn’t really matter either way: Mary Weiss’s voice still cut through.