The teenage star of the Shangri-Las who sang of angst

Mary Weiss 1948–2024

Mary Weiss personified ’60s teen cool. As the lead singer of the Shangri-Las, with six top-40 hits between 1964 and 1966, she inspired young women fans to copy her leather pants and her air of lovelorn melodrama. Her 1964 No. 1 hit “Leader of the Pack,” sung from the point of view of a girl in love with a bad boy who dies in a motorcycle accident, was recorded when she was only 15 but conveyed real emotion. Weiss leaned into the melodrama of the call-and-response vocals, acting as much as singing. “I’m kind of a shy person,” she said, “but I felt that the recording studio was the place that you could really release what you’re feeling without everybody looking at you.” Born in working-class Queens in New York City, Weiss was raised by her mother after her father died when she was an infant. She and her older sister Betty formed the Shangri-Las with another set of sisters at their high school, naming their group after a local restaurant. Edgy and unpolished, with a “street-smart vibe,” they had a look and sound “that challenged the reigning glamour of groups such as the Chiffons and Supremes,” said The Washington Post. They were signed to a label after they’d released just one single. The Shangri-Las dissolved in 1968, and Weiss worked at an architecture firm until 2001, when the Sept. 11 attacks destroyed the building she’d been working on just one block from the World Trade Center. She returned to music and released a well-received solo album, Dangerous Game, in 2007. Weiss always maintained that the Shangri-Las weren’t a “girl group,” a term she viewed as sexist, said The New York Times. “A lot of men were considered artists, whether or not other people wrote for them, where women were considered products,” she said. “I always found that difficult to accept.”