For much of their career, Jerry Leiber (words) and Mike Stoller (music) specialized in coming up with songs that sounded almost unwritten, as if they had popped into being straight out of the oral blues tradition. This is the illusion they managed to pull off with “Searchin’,” “Ruby Baby,” “Kansas City” and many others. From an early age they loved the blues, and their main goal was to create what they considered to be authentic black music. In “Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography,” Leiber bluntly describes their mind-set: “We were two guys looking to write songs for black artists with black feelings rendered in black vernacular.”
Jerry Leiber, left, and Mike Stoller, 1988.
In the 1950s and ’60s, they wrote hits for black artists like Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton, the Coasters, the Drifters and Ben E. King, but their songs also did the job for white performers like Elvis Presley and Dion. Considered disposable when they first came out, Leiber-Stoller songs have proved hardy, having been recorded or performed by a variety of singers and groups, including James Brown, Perry Como, the Beatles, Little Richard, Peggy Lee, Hank Snow, Frank Sinatra, Joni Mitchell, Danzig, Loudon Wainwright III, Donna Summer and Bjork.
“Hound Dog” tells the Leiber-Stoller story in a straightforward, conversational manner. The third co-author is David Ritz, who has collaborated on memoirs with Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Don Rickles, among others. In what may be the best thing he has written, “Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye,” Ritz didn’t have to worry about pleasing his subject: the book started out as a collaborative venture, only to end up an unauthorized biography after Gaye was shot dead by his own father.
“Hound Dog” is a coupla white guys swapping stories, with Leiber and Stoller serving as dual narrators. In the first pages, Leiber is a kid from a Yiddish-speaking household in Baltimore. At the age of 9 he smokes Old Golds. Neighborhood toughs pick a fight with him, shouting, “Jewboy, get that Jewboy!” as police officers look on, doing nothing. Stoller spends his childhood in Sunnyside, Queens. He rides the subway and bus to take piano lessons from the boogie-woogie great James P. Johnson. In the mid-to-late ’40s, the families of both budding songwriters move to Los Angeles.
I love autobiographies that chart a slow, difficult rise. This isn’t one of them. The boys score a songwriting contract soon after meeting each other at 17, and the book chugs through encounters with Elvis Presley, the wreck of the Andrea Doria (Stoller was a passenger) and a night when Norman Mailer puts Leiber in a chokehold at Elaine’s restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Here and there I found myself arguing with the text, suspicious of the narrators’ reliability. It’s 1952, and Leiber and Stoller are rising hotshots in the Los Angeles scene. The bandleader Johnny Otis asks them to come up with something for his singer, Big Mama Thornton. Here is how Leiber describes the writing of “Hound Dog”: “We ran back to Mike’s house on Norton — he was still living with his folks — and knocked out a song in a matter of minutes. It happened like lightning. We knew, as they say in the South, that this dog would hunt.” For the song that gives the book its title, all we get is a string of clichés. The story goes on to chronicle the recording session, during which Leiber objects to Thornton’s vocal approach. She’s crooning, he says, rather than belting it out. They have a testy exchange, and he sings the song himself, to show her how it’s done. At this point Stoller takes over the narrative: “Big Mama heard how Jerry was singing the thing. She heard the rough-and-tough of the song and, just as important, the implicit sexual humor. In short, she got it.”
Thornton’s account is much different. In an interview included on the album “Leavin’ Chicago,” she says she did “Hound Dog” in one take and credits the guitarist Pete Lewis for establishing the feel. In another interview, with the music writer Ralph Gleason, she said: “They were just a couple of kids then. . . . I started to sing the words and join in some of my own. All that talkin’ and hollerin’ — that’s my own.”
“Hound Dog” doesn’t mention Thornton’s account, but it does take issue with Otis, who was listed as the third writer of “Hound Dog” in its first pressings. Stoller goes out of his way to state that Otis was “not a writer of the song,” italics his.
Otis made the case for his “Hound Dog” contribution in a 2000 interview: “Parts of it weren’t really acceptable. I didn’t like that reference to chicken and watermelon, said, ‘Let’s get that . . . out of there.’ . . . Then Elvis Presley made it a megahit, and they got greedy. They sued me in court. They won, they beat me out of it.” The alleged presence of “chicken” and “watermelon” in the original lyric, as well as other complications, goes unmentioned in “Hound Dog.”
A huge song on the Leiber-Stoller résumé is Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” which hit No. 4 on the Billboard pop charts during its initial 1961 release and reached No. 9 on its 1986 rerelease, timed to the Rob Reiner movie of the same name. Its writers are listed as King-Glick, with Glick standing for “Elmo Glick,” a Leiber-Stoller pseudonym. In the “Hound Dog” version of how “Stand by Me” came about, Stoller recalls “arriving at our office as Jerry and Ben were working on lyrics for a new song.” His own contribution to “Stand by Me,” he remembers, was the bass line.
But Stoller’s version doesn’t line up with two earlier accounts of the song’s genesis. In “Always Magic in the Air,” Ken Emerson’s well-reported history of the New York-based songwriters of the early ’60s, the author reports that King sat at the piano and played “Stand by Me” at the end of a session, after Leiber and Stoller asked him if he had another song. Not taking a side on the issue of credit, Emerson writes that King drew on old gospel music “to compose” the song, but he also refers to “Stand by Me” as “Leiber, Stoller and King’s.” In another recent book, “1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time and the Artists, Stories and Secrets Behind Them,” by Toby Creswell, King, quoted at length, describes having written “Stand by Me” before the session. “The song more or less wrote itself,” King said, adding that he had rehearsed it with the Drifters and that “they liked it very much.”
In “Hound Dog,” Leiber gives short shrift to King’s contribution and elevates his partner’s role: “The lyrics are good, King’s vocal is great. But Mike’s bass line pushed the song into the land of immortality. Believe me — it’s the bass line.” It’s worth noting that one-third of “Stand by Me” is a valuable thing. BMI reports that it was the fourth-most-played song on American radio and TV in the 20th century.
Collaboration is a messy business. So is autobiography. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that Leiber and Stoller were among the pioneers who helped bring black and white musical forms together. It has been a historically fraught process, but the collision of cultures is probably what has given such energy and tension to American music. “Hound Dog” is an important part of that story.
Jim Windproof is a contributing editor at Vanishing.