Yesterday afternoon, I was moving slowly through the parking lot at Jewel. Stuck behind a car, I tuned into the local NPR classical music station. A cello and piano piece was playing, and within moments, the grimy, humdrum landscape changed. So much instantly felt charged with the possibility of story: that woman pushing her cart now a matriarch on the cusp of losing a son or a daughter to estrangement; that one idling in his car’s deep in contemplation of what she said last night, or what she’d just said now, back in the store, before turning her back in an it’s really over now gesture; the looks on the faces of the folks waiting for the bus on Sycamore Road each telling a story that this striking music in my car, now, improbably, was scoring.
I learned later that I’d been listening to Theme and Variations on “Draw the Sacred Circle Closer”: IV. Variations 3 and 4, by Adolphus Hailstork; the musicians were the cellist Kristen Yeon-Ji Yun and pianist Phoenix Park-Kim. If I ever hear this music again it will be, like that lousy parking lot, altered, forever an (inadvertent) soundtrack to stories cast by my imagination. Something similar happened back in December as I was sitting in my car in a Target parking lot. I think I’m ripe for these moments because I’ve been listening to the Shangri-Las and their remarkable run of mid-1960s singles.
A couple of years ago I found “Out in the Streets” in a box of 45s at a local joint, smitten as ever by that guitar slingin’ robin on the label. I grab any I can find when I’m crate digging. The names on the label are familiar: Jeff Barry. Ellie Greenwich. Shadow Morton. Artie Butler. For the liner notes of the terrific compilation The Shangri-Las: The Best of the Red Robin and Mercury Recordings, released in 2021, John Grecco enlisted the help of his friend Brooks Arthur to properly name the many musicians who played on the Shangri-Las tracks. Grecco calls Arthur “The All Time King of Engineers.” He compiled exhaustive lists and notes on recording sessions over the years, and, thankfully, his list of performers and studio staff appears on the album. Yet it’s not as if knowing who exactly engineered, or who played drums, guitars, keyboards, and horns—not to mention who supplied the hand claps and finger snaps—will help solve the fantastic mystery of how the evocative, dynamic soundscapes on those 45s were created. The sum’s nearly always greater than the parts on the best Shangri-Las tunes.
This one’s over in under three minutes and feels as dense and layered as a three-hour film. The atmosphere Shangri-Las and Morton create somehow merges bedroom longing and street rawness without sounding contrived or insincere, much of it is due to Mary Weiss’s naked, honest singing, much of it is due to the lyrics evoking rather than directly saying: what are the “wild things” that her now-good boy doesn’t do anymore? (I’m imagining them.) And what about that long, isolated ooooohhh at the front? Is that wisdom or regret, or both? She loves him, yet it pains her that he lost himself in loving her back. And who’s downstairs at the end?
One verse evokes biography, rumor, story, and back story in thirty-six words:
He grew up on the sidewalk
Streetlights shining above
He grew up with no one to love
He grew up on the sidewalks
He grew up running free
He grew up and then he met me
No wonder Bruce Springsteen was obsessed with the Shangri-Las. He’d have killed to have written that passage. The sexiest line? “There’s something about his kissing that tells me he’s changed.” The Shangri-Las nailed complicated sentiment like this: adolescent mysteries cloudily originating, and then shockingly revealed, in sex, and then made even more more mysterious, all of it wrapped in moody, heartbreaking major-minor melody shifts (naive to curious, innocent to knowing) and decorous language, the vivid details—the facts—of his kissing graphically burning in the singer’s memories, hers alone, and tragic because of that.
None of this is new, and yet the song still amazes me with each listen.
If nothing else, “Leader of the Pack” taught me at a young age the transcendent and moving power of chord changes, and of course a lot about melodrama, too. I didn’t know the word “melodrama” in grade school, and yet Mary Ann and Margie Ganser’s gossipy questions and Weiss’s sorrowful replies sounded so much like the juicy half-murmured, half-shrieked conversations among the girls on the blacktop during recess, where squeals in the air competed with the blackbirds in the tress lining the fields. No one was riding motorcycles in my junior high (I don’t think, though I can imagine who would’ve been cool and gutsy enough to try), but the drama in this song between the singer and her crush felt all too real: it mimicked my own flutters near the girls who I loved from afar, and was a kind of sonic translation of the complicated looks on the faces of some of those girls, especially on Monday mornings, when whatever transpired over the weekend at the parties I wasn’t invited to marked those girls with the indelible ink of Experience. All of it was yet beyond my ken, of course, but as I listened in my basement on the weekends to “Leader of the Pack” on Dick Clark’s 20 Years of Rock ‘N’ Roll album, I was catching up.
The Weiss sisters—Betty also sang in the iterations of the group—and the Ganser sisters grew up a block away from each in Cambria Heights, in Queens, New York, and when they were in the Shangri-Las they were only a few years older than the girls at my school. Weiss sang “Leader of the Pack” in a voice so tough and broken; when she hits the top of her range on lines like “He stood there and asked me why / But all I could do was cry,” that tumble into the minor on “cry” captured, in one second, everything I did and didn’t understand about being thirteen.
In 2007, Mary Weiss spoke with Terry Gross on Fresh Air about the drama inside so many of the Shangri-Las’ songs, and she really nailed the group’s appeal, which originates in a specific time but rides aloft waves of timelessness. “I was used to that kind of drama [in “Leader of the Pack”] in my life, so I think it would come out in my performances,” she remarked.
“What kind of drama in your life?” Gross wondered.
“Well, I think teenagers, for the most part—I can only speak for myself,” Weiss said.
But teenagers have an intensity that we seem to—I don’t think we grow out of. But there’s variable shades of gray added where, when you’re a teen, a lot of things—or for me, anyway, everything was black and white.
“Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” are both about loss, but the distance between the two singles—they were released roughly a year apart, which was a cultural eon in the timespan of mid-60s Top 100 radio—was emotionally vast. And those stark teen truths began to morph into grays.
“Remember” is a pretty standard narrative: I loved, he left, I pine. Yet Morton’s song—that is, the sound that the song creates and the world it invents—is particular. He allegedly wrote the tune on a hard deadline, in his car in the dark while parked near the water in Oyster Bay. I can only imagine how that landscape beyond his windshield came alive for him as inspiration hit. He imported the wind-tossed seagulls and crashing waves into the record via sound effects, but the song’s other reality—heartbreak—arrives in the melody and arrangement, in Weiss’s vulnerable, wounded vocal, and in that grave, descending three-note piano intro, the song already hanging its head in despair before Weiss sings and her mates sympathize.
Morton had a knack for writing songs that sound like what thinking feels like: the anguished “oh no no” breakdown leads directly to the chorus, an obsessive back and forth between desire and memory, and we’re deep inside the singer’s head, where the song is really set. That fading “remember” evokes the nagging, unshakeable regrets so powerfully that the song could’ve been a two minute variation on that chorus alone and it still would’ve killed. The bold, moody arrangement and Morton’s studio touches are so visceral as to feel masochistic, sonic salt in the poor girl’s wounds. “Remember” was allegedly seven minutes long in its first version—a teenager’s diary filled from front to back! That might’ve been too much drama for anyone.
Though the Shangri-Las’ songs were for the most part classically, if not conservatively, composed pop music, the songs themselves still feel unresolved to me, because the raw emotions in them hum like currents, nearly too hot to touch, and are still warm as the songs end. “I Can Never Go Home Again” is brutally sad; it undoes me. The song begins with a disclaimer of sorts (“Listen, does this sound familiar?”) that announces that this story is as old as dirt. Here, the singer gets what she wants (“Your life is so lonely / Like a child without a toy / Then a miracle, a boy”) and follows that marvel to the fabled horizon, but she loses whats she didn’t know she needs. The teen melodrams is really turned up here, the heat stifling: Mom cautions restraint (“She told me it was not really love / But only my girlish pride”), daughter bolts, Mom dies of heartache. Absurdly soap-y, other-century, even, in its theatrics. Yet, again, the women sell it, Weiss’s reckoning so exposed, her grief and regrets palpable, the Greek chorus of her pals from Queens wistfully chiding.
Glad, Bad, Sad—the bullet-points in the lyrics gloss nearly all of the stories that the Shangri-Las sang during their brief career. “I Can Never Go Home Again” was, appropriately, the group’s last major hit—it reached the five spot in the Hot 100 in October 1965. Diminishing returns for a so-called girl group in the ever radicalizing landscape of ‘60s pop music: “Long Live Our Love" (January ‘66) hit 33 on the charts, “He Cried” (March ‘66) hit 65, “Past, Present, Future” (May ‘66) hit 59, “The Sweet Sounds of Summer” (December ‘66) reached 123; their final single, “Take the Time” (March ‘67) didn’t chart. “I Can Never Go Home Again” feels like the Shangri-Las’ swan song. Its story spans the long, fraught journey of adolescence, from its bright, sugary highs to its shadowy, barely-understood lows, and is nothing less than a Pop Bildungsroman. The closing chapter of a story about rebellion, independence, and maturity.
Melodrama? Maybe. But life’s emotional pitch, especially to a teenager, can feel absurd and over-the-top. “Anything involving pain, I could totally relate to,” Weiss once remarked. That was the truth.
“The Shangri-Las on the cover of Cash Box, February 13, 1965” via Creative Commons
Bravo Joe, this is a superb piece and it's true, no one does melancholy quite like Shangri-Las. 'I Can Never Go Home Anymore' never fails to pull at the heartstrings.
Excellent piece of writing! Really illuminates why those recordings are so timeless, and great. There's a wonderful Shangri-Las episode of Andrew Hickey's "History Of Rock Music In 500 Songs" podcast (#121), a good companion to your piece. Thanks!