The Shangri- Las had so many great hits. My favorite was You Can Never Go Home Again. I also loved the name of the group.
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The Shangri- Las had so many great hits. My favorite was You Can Never Go Home Again. I also loved the name of the group.
A good article about Mary Weiss and the impact and influence of The Shangri Las:
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/...-oh-no/677266/
Couldn't read the whole piece due to 'paywall' on their site; thanks anyway for sharing it and here's a similar tribute to The Shangri-Las from Goldmine.com.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spreadinglove21
Remembering Mary Weiss with 5 Shangri-Las flip sides.
On February 1, as part of our monthly Goldmine In Memoriam series, we will pay tribute to The Shangri-Las’ lead singer Mary Weiss, who passed January 19 at age 75. At that time, we will feature The Shangri-Las’ Top 10 mid-1960s singles “Leader of the Pack,” “Remember [[Walkin’ in the Sand),” and “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” along with the title song from Weiss’ 2007 solo album Dangerous Game. In the meantime, we share five fabulous flip sides from the New York City girl group.
Heaven Only Knows
The flip side of 1965’s “Give Us Your Blessings” was the steady paced “Heaven Only Knows,” with both sides written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. The songs appeared on the group’s second Red Bird album Shangri-Las-65! with an album cover featuring sketches of the pair of sisters, Betty and Mary Weiss, and twins Mary Ann and Marge Ganser.
The Train from Kansas City
The next single from the album was “Right Now and Not Later,” with “The Train from Kansas City” on its flip side. The 2021 HoZac Books initial volume of The White Label Promo Preservation Society: 100 Flop Albums You Ought to Know, a music book series about overlooked albums, included a chapter on Shangri-Las-65! written by singer-songwriter Lisa Burns, who cited Mary Weiss as one of her influences. Burns wrote, “‘The Train from Kansas City’ with its propulsive train rhythm is a three-minute masterpiece written by Barry and Greenwich, with Barry co-producing the song with George “Shadow” Morton and is devastatingly beautiful.”
Dressed in Black
The following year, The Shangri-Las released a female version of Jay & the Americans’ Top 5 debut single “She Cried,” called “He Cried.” The flip side was the dramatic “Dressed in Black” which Shadow Morton co-wrote with Tony Michaels and Vinny Gorman.
Love You More Than Yesterday
Equally dramatic as the “Dressed in Black” flip side was the group’s next single, “Past, Present and Future” which had two different flip sides, both with the Red Bird catalog number RD 10-068. “Love You More Than Yesterday,” another Morton, Michaels and Gorman composition, was a bouncy declaration of love, even though the guy Weiss sang about has gone away.
Paradise
The other flip side of the single was the hopeful “Paradise” written by Harry Nilsson, wonderfully arranged by Artie Butler. Based on the secondary catalog number of GG 1213 for “Paradise” versus GG 1218 on the “Love You More Than Yesterday” single, this appears to be the initial flip side of the two.
Good article Motown Eddie, thanks. Here's a copy and paste of the Atlantic article:
On April 21, 1965, three members of the Shangri-Las appeared on ABC’s musical variety show Shindig, their silhouettes faintly visible on the dark stage. With the soft thunk of a bass guitar, one spotlight flickered on to illuminate Mary Weiss, the band’s leader. As she crooned the opening lyrics to “Out in the Streets,” the lights gleamed over her bandmates, Marge and Mary-Ann Ganser, dancing in slow motion. You could practically feel plumes of fog gathering at your heels while listening to Weiss’s vocals tremble with palpable dread.
“Out in the Streets”—written, with Phil Spector, by the husband-wife team behind hits such as the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me”—circles familiar romantic territory, albeit with a doomy bent. The song is told from the perspective of a woman who watches the man she’s in love with change—for her sake, she suspects—at the expense of his happiness. With Weiss’s vocal delivery, the tune transforms from a schmaltzy ballad into something stunningly outré and operatic.
No singer on earth has ever sounded like Weiss, who died last Friday at her Palm Springs, California, home at the age of 75. As the linchpin of the Shangri-Las, she imbued their songs of heartbreak with nuance and levity alike and has shaped music’s evolution in the decades since the band began. Though short-lived, the Shangri-Las were incredibly influential: Punk-rock acts, such as the Ramones and Blondie, owe them a great debt; the Scottish post-punkers the Jesus and Mary Chain revved a motorcycle engine in one of their own gloomy pop songs, just as the Shangri-Las had; the irreverent band Sonic Youth sampled “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” in one of their pummeling rock songs; Amy Winehouse once said she’d listened to the group’s brutal “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” for two full weeks to nurse a bad breakup.
In recent years, the Shangri-Las have also unwittingly shaped the TikTok generation. The band’s first hit, 1964’s “Remember [[Walkin’ in the Sand),” now provides the backing track to countless instances of catastrophe. In fall 2020, creators in gaming circles started implementing in their videos the rapper Kreepa’s song “Oh No”—which samples the “Oh no” portion of the Shangri-Las’ “Remember,” Auto-Tuned and pitched up—and using freeze-frames to zoom in on amusingly disastrous moments. One video sees a clumsy cat moments away from plunging into water, while another shows a startled weight lifter tripping in front of a crush at the gym. The song went viral on TikTok. Stripped of its original context, Weiss’s voice morphed into an on-loop lament soundtracking all manner of humorous calamities.
The origin story of “Remember” could make for its own song. In the early 1960s, Weiss and her older sister, Betty, met the Ganser sisters at Andrew Jackson High School in Cambria Heights, Queens. The quartet started singing at school dances, wearing leather jackets and tailored pants. In 1964, they were recruited by an enterprising producer, George “Shadow” Morton. He wanted them to record “Remember [[Walkin’ in the Sand)”—a song he’d written hastily on the side of the road in Long Island, as seagulls cawed in the distance.
The song is hard to forget. Backed by ominous piano clinks and chilling harmonies, the 15-year-old Weiss’s idiosyncratic voice quivers with longing: “Seems like the other day, my baby went away / He went away ’cross the sea.” Then, a twist: Her love has met someone new overseas—a fact she refuses to accept. “Oh no, oh no, oh no no no no no,” Weiss croons, right before the sound of seagull squawking enters the mix. In a call-and-response, the group whisper-sings “Remember!” as Weiss recalls “Walkin’ in the sand / Walkin’ hand in hand.”
Although the girl-group era was starting to wane in 1964, “Remember” took off, peaking at No. 5 on the Billboard charts. The Shangri-Las scored a No. 1 hit later that year with “Leader of the Pack,” a song about falling for the head of a bike gang that ends with said paramour dying in a twisted tangle of metal and glass. The song’s revving-engine sound effects, grim subject matter, and brassy vocal interplay [[“Look out, look out!”)—plus those leather jackets—contributed to the band being labeled as “tough” in the media, a description that confounded Weiss.
But Weiss’s voice had an undeniable flintiness to it. The Shangri-Las’ songs are devastating, and not just because they deal with heartbreak: They plumb the ways a person can make tragic decisions in an effort to be understood, often becoming unrecognizable in the process. Relationships, the Shangri-Las’ suggest, are fickle and can fail simply because of life’s uneven contours. Weiss was capable of transmuting the embarrassment, sorrow, defiance, and even cheekiness that can accompany this anguish.
In Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las, the author Ada Wolin astutely points out that the Shangri-Las are forever thought of as teenagers in the public consciousness. The fact that the Shangri-Las disbanded in 1968—just a few years after their inception—likely has something to do with this. [[For her part, Weiss became disillusioned with music, later alluding to legal disputes she couldn’t comment on, but she came back to the medium in the mid-2000s and released the solo album Dangerous Game.) But their music did more than address fleeting teenage romances. The Shangri-Las’ songs continue to resonate so viscerally with listeners decades on because of how ably they tackle grief and angst. Propelled by the despair in Weiss’s voice, these songs feel like miracles capable of encompassing the simultaneous pain and hope of living in the world right now.
Paula Mejía is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles.
Great article about The Shangri-Las. And yes indeed; the group was short lived but very influential in many ways. Continue to Rest In Music, Power & Peace Mary Weiss.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spreadinglove21