Sophisticated Boom Boom 

Nearly forgotten in the sixty years since their first hit, the Shangri-Las hit the news this past weekend when Mary Weiss, their blonde lead singer, died at age 75. 

The Shangri-Las’ musical coming of age came just as Beatlemania was crashing the shores and the Brill Building girl group sound began to falter. Four teenagers from Queens, sisters Mary and Betty Weiss and twins Marge and Mary Ann Ganser, cut “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and it went to #5 in July, 1964. Even in a year with so many great records – “Dancing in the Street,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “She Loves You,” “Oh Pretty Woman” – “Remember,” with its doomsday piano chords, seagull sounds, finger snaps and Mary Weiss’ emotional vocal still holds up its end quite well. 

I was just a kid, so older girls were a mystery, but I’d watch the Shangri-Las lip-synching on Clay Cole’s dance show, and they seemed to have a worldliness about them, like the high school girls I’d see at the Woolworth’s downtown, shopping for make-up and wearing their boyfriend’s oversized blue and gold letter jackets. 

The Shangri-Las’ label wasted no time with a follow-up. “Remember” was still in the top five when “Leader of the Pack” was released that October. By the end of November it hit #1. 

This video tells you all you need to know about how seriously adults, especially variety show directors, took the record: 

The song starts as every parent’s bad dream – their daughter in love with a dropout from the “wrong side of town,” a J.D. who’s convinced her that he has a shy, vulnerable side (“They told me he was bad, but I knew he was sad’). But it shifts gears and becomes the teenager’s nightmare when dad tells her to dump the loser; he pulls off recklessly onto the rain-slicked road and crashes his motorcycle. Jimmy’s dead! And it’s dad’s fault! 

Shangri-La records were equal parts innocence and toughness, moody teenage melodramas. And musically adventurous: sassy vocals in “Sophisticated Boom Boom,” Iron Butterfly psychedelic overtones of  “The Sweet Sounds of Summer” or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata playing underneath “Past, Present and Future,” they were all groundbreaking in their own way. 

Shadow Morton wrote "Remember" and co-wrote "Leader of the Pack." He produced the Shangri-Las and captured all that angsty teenage attitude before going on to produce the Vanilla Fudge, whose over-wrought vocals and arrangements squeezed every bit of drama possible from their Motown and Beatles covers, and Janis Ian. Think of  “Society’s Child” as essentially a Shangri-Las record with a wider worldview. 

Growing up, Bruce Springsteen surely internalized some of these sounds. His arrangements of “Jungleland” and “Backstreets” owed a lot to Morton. And when he sang, “I know your daddy don’t dig me, but he never did understand,” the Leader of the Pack couldn’t have said it any better.