Mary Weiss, who was the lead singer of Shangri-Las' 1964 No. 1 hit “Leader of the Pack,” squeezing every ounce of passion and pathos available into a three-minute teen soap opera, died Friday at her home. in Palm Springs, California. She was 75 years old.
His death was announced by the author and television writer David Stenn, who had been collaborating with Ms. Weiss on a musical about Shangri-Las. He said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
“Leader of the Pack,” Shangri-Las’ second and biggest hit, was narrated by a young woman who falls in love with a tough guy who rides a motorcycle without her parents’ approval: “They told me he was bad/But I knew.” who was sad” and then is left heartbroken when he dies in a car accident on a rainy night. Produced and co-written by Shadow Morton, the single featured call-and-response vocals, full-on teen angst, and motorcycle sound effects. It was excessive and melodramatic, requiring both acting and singing, but Weiss won him over with her yearning performance. He was only 16 years old when he topped the charts.
“I'm a bit of a shy person, but I felt like the recording studio was the place where you could really express what you felt without everyone looking at you,” Ms. Weiss said in Ken Emerson's book “Always Magic in the Air.” of 2006 about notable early rock 'n' roll songwriting teams. “I was in enough pain at the time to do anything and go into it and sound credible.”
The Shangri-Las had six Top 40 singles between 1964 and 1966, all produced with verve by Mr. Morton. Songs like “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and “Past, Present and Future” made the end of a young romance seem like an era-defining tragedy, but they masked their emotional desperation with an air of bravery. Wearing leather pants, as opposed to the formal dresses favored by groups like the Supremes, they embodied '60s bad girl chic and inspired legions of other musicians.
Amy Winehouse, in the 2012 documentary “Amy Winehouse: The Day She Came to Dingle,” praised Shangri-Las – “I love the drama, I love the atmosphere, I love the sound effects” – and described the song's single. group's 1965 “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” as “the saddest song in the world,” recalling how he listened to it over and over again for days after a painful breakup.
Ms. Weiss called herself a “street singer.” According to Stenn, she said that the biggest compliment she had ever been given came when she ran into Joey Ramone at the punk club CBGB and he told her, “Without Shangri-Las, there would have been no Ramones.”
Ellie Greenwich, who wrote “Leader of the Pack” with Jeff Barry and Mr. Morton, as well as two other Shangri-Las singles with Mr. Barry, told Mr. Emerson: “The Shangri-Las were tough girls and I “I was a little scared.” from them. They had an attitude before They did it.”
Mary Louise Weiss was born on December 28, 1948 in Queens, the youngest of three children of Perry and Elizabeth (Treubig) Weiss. Her father, who worked for the telephone company, died of undiagnosed heart disease on Valentine's Day 1949, less than two months after her birth. “I would have been a different person if my father hadn't died,” she said in a 2006 interview with Miriam Linna and Billy Miller of Norton Records, the label that released a Weiss solo album in 2007.
He loved music from a young age, preferring harmony groups like the Ink Spots, the Everly Brothers, and the youth groups who sang a cappella on nearby street corners. She and her older sister, Elizabeth (known professionally as Betty), became friends with Marge and Mary Ann Ganser, twin sisters who attended Andrew Jackson High School with them; They harmonized together at Ganser's house or at the local playground.
They called themselves Shangri-Las, after the Long Island Shangri-La restaurant, and after performing at local dances and releasing a single, “Wishing Well,” on the small Spokane label in 1964, they were recruited by Morton to record a demo of their composition “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”, a session that featured a young Billy Joel on piano.
That song got Shangri-Las signed to Red Bird, the record label run by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; Released as a single, it peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Weiss remembered the next three years as an exhausting whirlwind of studio dates and whirlwind tours. Other Shangri-Las left the group at various points, making the group a trio until they returned; Ms. Weiss, who did most of the lead vocals, was the constant.
“Fame doesn't do anything for me, it never did,” he told the New York Times in 2007. “I never really liked it.”
After Red Bird closed in 1966, Shangri-Las signed with Mercury. They released two unsuccessful singles, one of them a pro-Vietnam War song, “Take the Time”, before breaking up in 1968.
“When we started, it was all about music,” Weiss told Rolling Stone in 2007. “When it ended, it was all about litigation.”
Long-running lawsuits prevented Ms. Weiss from recording until 1977, when Shangri-Las made an album for Sire Records (run by Seymour Stein, who had previously worked as the group's tour manager). That album was never released; Ms. Weiss was not happy with its quality.
The group reunited again for an oldies concert in 1989 in New Jersey. It was their last show together.
After retiring from music, Ms. Weiss worked at an architectural firm, where she spent years as an administrator specializing in commercial interiors. That career ended after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when a building she had been working on a block from the World Trade Center was destroyed, destroying a $20 million deal.
In 2007, he released his first and only solo album, the well-received “Dangerous Game.” That year she told Rolling Stone that whenever a songwriter came up with “the perfect song for Mary,” it inevitably featured a gruesome death along the lines of “Leader of the Pack.”
Mrs. Weiss is survived by her husband, Edward Ryan; her sister Elizabeth Nelson, who is now the last survivor of Shangri-La; and her niece, Tracy Kendall.
The Shangri-Las were often described as a “girl group” (as were the Ronettes, the Shirelles and other groups of that era), but Weiss abhorred the term, which she considered a symptom of the sexism of the music industry. As he said in 2007 in a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame interview (the Shangri-Las have not been inducted, although the Hall honored the “Leader of the Pack” in 2019): “A lot of men were considered artists, since whether other people wrote for them or not, where women were considered products. And I always found it difficult to accept that.”
