SONGWRITING LEGEND MIKE STOLLER CELEBRATES 70 YEARS IN MUSIC!
AS IF IT WASN’T enough to be the last of rock’n’roll’s founding fathers still standing, the legendary Mike Stoller – the tunesmith foil to lyricist Jerry Leiber from 1952 until the latter’s death in 2011 – has unveiled a seldom suspected side to his musicality: as heir to the tradition of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers. Released in September, Brendan McCreary
Sings The Love Songs Of Mike Stoller beautifully showcases 10 Broadway-style numbers, mostly co-written with Leiber, mostly unheard before on record, revealing that the pair could as easily have rattled along Tin Pan Alley as kick-started the R&B revolution.
Stoller made this throwback to a more elegant era happen after a chance encounter with a cousin of Cole Porter inspired him to dig into his trove of songs with his old partner.
“We’d started writing a musical about Oscar Wilde but nothing came of it,” the pin-sharp and affable 90-year-old tells MOJO via Zoom from his home in LA. “The book – the play part – was never finished.” Another musical remains unfinished too, but it may be third time lucky with Stoller’s next project, co-writing a musical with Iris Rainer Dart of her novel Beaches, as filmed in 1988 with Bette Midler.
Truly, his is a musical life crowded with incident. No moment is more dramatic, arguably, than when in July 1956 Leiber rushed to tell him that their 1953 R&B smash for Big Mama Thornton, Hound Dog, was selling even faster as sung by some new kid called Elvis Presley. Stoller hadn’t known because he’d been on the ocean liner SS Andrea Doria, which had sunk off the coast of Massachusetts; he heard the good news as
“After it sold seven million singles I began to see some merit in it.” MIKE STOLLER ON ELVIS’S HOUND DOG
he stepped off the lifeboat. Neither thought the Elvis version was a patch on Big Mama’s, incidentally: “After it sold seven million singles I began to see some merit in it,” Stoller laughs. The pair went on to write for Elvis, and for black artists including Jimmy Witherspoon, The Drifters and The Coasters, many of whose hits were covered by a new generation of rockers including The Beatles and Stones. Another link to the future would be Leiber & Stoller’s young apprentice, Phil Spector: “We had him signed to an exclusive contract – which somehow disappeared. He was sleeping in our offices so had access,” Stoller chuckles. “A ver y talented young man – but a difficult person.”
This was all when Leiber & Stoller were bossing the Brill Building and mentoring such talents as Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, whose memorial Stoller recently attended: “a very special occasion, with such a sense of love.” No love was lost, alas, between Leiber and Bob Dylan, the former describing the latter as, “self-aggrandising and full of shit” in 2008. Dylan replied seven years later, calling the Leiber & Stoller canon, “Novelty songs. They weren’t saying anything serious.” Today Stoller sighs regretfully. “I had nothing to do with it personally but I’m sorry to this day it all happened. I liked a lot of Bob Dylan songs. They were wonderful.
I know that he trashed Leiber & Stoller, which of course included me. Had I thought anything negative about Bob? I didn’t think he was the world’s greatest singer, but I thought he was a hell of a good writer.”