The Guys Who Wrote 'em: Songwriting Geniuses of Rock and Pop [Paperback]

Leiber & Stoller. Mann & Weil. Greenwich & Barry. Bobby Hart. Chip Taylor. Holland-Dozier-Holland. Tony Macaulay. Stock, Aitken & Waterman. Few would recognise them in the street but they are responsible for some of the best-selling and most famous songs of all time. From Jailhouse Rock to You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' to Leader Of The Pack to (Theme From) The Monkees to Reach Out I'll Be There to Wild Thing to Build Me Up Buttercup to I Should Be So Lucky, their melodies and lyrics are embedded in the minds of music lovers worldwide. With the aid of lengthy and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in the history of rock and pop songwriting, Sean Egan's The Guys Who Wrote 'Em seeks to put right the lack of recognition for compositional geniuses who for most of their careers have chosen to use their musical skills to help not themselves but others achieve stardom. The result is a recounting of the story of post-Elvis popular music from an intriguing and delightful lateral angle. Amongst those to whom respected music journalist Egan has been granted access are Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry, Eddie and Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Bobby Hart, Joey Levine, Graham Gouldman, Chip Taylor, Tony Macaulay, Nicky Chinn, Mike Stock and Matt Aitken. Their anecdotes feature Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, Eric Clapton, The Shangri-Las, Diana Ross, Jimi Hendrix and a host of other iconic figures. The Guys Who Wrote 'Em is both the most comprehensive book ever written about the 'bespoke songwriter' and the fascinating, untold story of popular music. Extract to run in 'Record Collector' magazine and reviews to appear in several music monthlies.

Sean Egan's first professional writing work was a brief stint providing scripts for the television soap opera EastEnders. He is currently a journalist specialising in popular music and tennis. He has written for, amongst other outlets, Billboard, Billboard.com, Classic Rock, Discoveries, Goldmine, Mojo4Music.com, Record Collector, Record Mart & Buyer, RollingStone.com, Serve And Volley, Sky Sports, Tennis World, Uncut and Vox. He also writes CD liner notes. He is the author of four previous non-fiction books, one of which – Jimi Hendrix And The Making Of Are You Experienced – was nominated for an Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He also wrote the critically acclaimed novel Sick Of Being Me.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1

Despite this exciting new deal with Atlantic, the record that changed Leiber's and Stoller's lives appeared on RCA and was, again, something they only found out about after it had been released. Elvis Presley was already a phenomenon following the chart topping success of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in early 1956 in the US (no. 2 in the UK). His rendition of ‘Hound Dog’ became his third US chart topper of that year. "I didn't find out he was gonna do it," says Leiber. "I found out that he had done it and it was already a hit. Harry Goodman called me and said, ‘Hey man - you've got a big, big hit’. ‘Big Mama Thornton all over again?’ He said, ‘No, Elvis Presley’." There was a delay before Stoller heard the good news. He had been travelling in Europe in the early part of ’56 and the Presley phenomenon had completely passed him by. Returning from Europe, the ship he was on, the Andrea Doria, sank and it was a somewhat bedraggled Stoller who returned to America to find that his and Leiber's lives had been transformed. "We came back to New York where I was planning to meet with Jerry and Lester Sill and the guys from Atlantic," he recalls. "When the freighter that had picked us up out of a lifeboat finally arrived in New York, Jerry was waiting at the dock. He said, ‘Guess what, Mike? We’ve got a smash hit – ‘Hound Dog!’" And I said, ‘No kidding! Big Mama Thornton?’ and he said, ‘No, some white kid named Elvis Presley’. And I said, ‘Who?’ I heard it the next day and it was number one already. It hit number one immediately after it was released."
Neither of the writers actually liked Presley's version, although Stoller wryly states, "As we've become used to saying: ‘But after it sold seven million records we began to see the merits of it’." The reason for their antipathy was the fact that Presley had completely changed the mood, the nature, the beat, and the lyrics of the composition. Does Stoller feel Presley's version rather misses the point? "Oh sure. The point was totally different because it was no longer a woman singing to a man saying, ‘You don't want a woman, all you want is a home’. The thing is, it still contained that aggressive anger in it with the line ‘You ain't nothin' but a hound dog’. The original was better than the version that he sang but I'm glad he did it." Of the way Presley turned a slow, twelve-bar blues into an up-tempo number, Stoller says, "It sounded too nervous. The original record is insinuating and funky and this was some kind of fast, nervous, rockabilly version."
There were financial as well as artistic liberties taken with ‘Hound Dog’, with Johnny Otis making an unwelcome return appearance. Stoller remembers, "After Elvis's record came out, it seems that when Johnny was signing his name and our names (ostensibly on our behalf) as the songwriters to Don Robey he was under contract exclusively to another company that he co-owned with Sid Nathan of King Records in Cincinnati, Ohio. So after the Elvis record became such a big hit they decided they would come and claim that they owned it – or a third of it - because Johnny put his name on it. It was bizarre. It was thrown out of court. When he [Otis] went to court he said that he was a co-writer but he couldn't remember what he'd written on it and the judge more or less said to him, ‘Do you know the difference between the truth and a lie?’ because it was apparent that, number one, he hadn't written it, number two, he was claiming it on behalf of a company that he co-owned after he had claimed to have written it and signed it to somebody else."
It's interesting that while it has become commonly accepted in some quarters that the success of Elvis Presley and the explosion of rock and roll his popularity engendered took black music out of its ghetto (in fact, some even posit the theory that rock and roll constituted the wholesale rip-off of black musical culture), neither Leiber or Stoller view the Presley phenomenon in those terms. "I don't think that we experienced Elvis as broadening the spectrum for black music," says Leiber. "We always felt that he was a great white Southern singer who had certain kinds of slight coloration that were tinted black but we didn't feel that he was a black singer at all. I thought he was a mixture of country & western and somewhat gospel (but not necessarily black gospel - he sounded white Baptist to me). To me, rock and roll was not black, rock and roll was white. Black is rhythm and blues and rock and roll is a hybrid. We have been attributed with inventing it and maybe we have done things that might indicate that, but we have never really experienced ourselves as rock and roll songwriters. For instance, we wrote a song for Big Mama Thornton and it became a big hit. And now comes the big transition: a white singer from Memphis who's a hell of a singer - he does have some black attitudes - takes the song over, does it and sells five or eight million copies compared to her half a million and saturates the world with his presence. But here's the thing: we didn't make it. His version is like a combination of country and skiffle. It's not black. He sounds like Hank Snow. In most cases where we are attributed with rock and roll, it's misleading, because what we did is usually the original record - which is R&B - and some other producer (and a lot of them are great) covered our original record."
© Sean Egan, 2004.