ShangriLas Mary Weiss dead at 75

[BayouMotownMan]

Just announced. RIP

[lakeside]

RIP Mary....and Mary Ann and Marge
Lead Singer of 1960s Girl Group The Shangri-Las Dies at 75 [[msn.com)

[daviddesper]

RIP Mary....and Mary Ann and Marge
Lead Singer of 1960s Girl Group The Shangri-Las Dies at 75 [[msn.com)

Sad news indeed. One of my favorite girl groups back in the day.

[Motown Eddie]

I'm Truly Sorry to hear about Mary Weiss of The Shangri-Las. Rest In Music, Power & Peace Mary.

[floyjoy678]

Very sad to see this ��

I used to email with Mary many years ago in the early 2000s. She was such a humble person with me fanboying in our conversations. It was like she couldn't understand why she had a fanbase.

She was only 15 and 16 years old when she recorded those songs. She was an amazing vocalist and probably could have been an actress.

The Train From Kansas City is my favorite Shangri-Las songs and one of my favorite songs in general.

RIP Mary

[daviddesper]

Agree about Kansas City. That and Right Now and Not Later could have been big hits for them.

[mysterysinger]

Mary had an iconic voice from the 60s and even if you didn't know her name you could certainly tell her voice. We, at least, can treasure those YouTube videos in which Mary and the other girls appear.

The Shangri Las had 3 tracks on the Motown album "Girl Groups The Story Of A Sound" [[5322ML / MCD09087MD / WD72140) which were:

"Leader Of The Pack"
"Give Him A Great Big Kiss"
"Remember [[Walkin' In The Sand)"

[Philles/Motown Gary]

Really sad to hear this bad news. The Shangri-las were Red Bird's hottest act. Mary's unique voice will live on forever with the best of the girl groups.

[midnightman]

I'm Truly Sorry to hear about Mary Weiss of The Shangri-Las. Rest In Music, Power & Peace Mary.

You can tell they were kids/teens in that picture. Mary was 15 there and looks all of it.

RIP

[Spreadinglove21]

Someone posted on twitter footage of Shangri Las and Dobie Grey performing Twist and Shout with cast of Shindig as closing credits roll.

https://twitter.com/TheWrongtom/stat...55217697599654

[gman]

she could really pull off DRAMA....of course Shadow Morton was the architect of the machine....but she made it run...her version of SHE CRIED [[He Cried) is great...I liked Train From Kansas City and Out In The Street the best....RIP.

[Spreadinglove21]

A good article about Mary Weiss and impact/influence of The Shangri-Las:

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/...-oh-no/677266/

[Spreadinglove21]

For those who can't access the article behind Atlantic paywall:

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.