This is Not a Trick Headline
Imagine you're a 16-year-old from the New Jersey suburbs right outside New York who had been singing in a band that played weddings, Sweet 16s, and bar/bat-mitzvahs. An A&R scout for a record company hears you sing in a Manhattan club, likes your voice. So does his boss. They sign you to a recording contract.
One afternoon, the A&R guy comes over to Tenafly, New Jersey, to help you with your homework. His name is Quincy Jones. He's got 250 demos to go over with you for your first recordings. You both like the first one: "It's My Party," which immediately establishes the career of singer Lesley Gore. It is the first record for Gore; the first number one for Jones.
Jones was a staff producer and A&R rep for Mercury Records, then Chicago-based with a small New York office and a smaller studio. Just after her 17th birthday, the teenage Lesley Gore has the number one single in June, 1963 with "It's My Party" ["and I'll cry if I want to"] and continued her hot streak that summer with "Judy's Turn to Cry." It was the end of an era in which albums were an afterthought. Through 1965, Gore has ten more top 40 hits, slightly less successful, battling the headwinds of the British Invasion. But Quincy Jones produced all of those records.
When she stopped crying, she fought back: "You Don't Own Me" was a pre-feminist anthem that happened to be written by two men, John Madara and David White. It peaked at No. 2 because there was only one single it could not dislodge: "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles. Her last hit, in 1967, "California Nights," was written by Marvin Hamlisch and Russ Titelman.
Gore, who finally blossomed as a songwriter after she left Mercury and moved to California in the early 1970s, died Feb. 16, 2015, of lung cancer at age 68. Besides a parent and brother, she was survived by her partner of 33 years, Lois Sasson. In 1998, we had lunch at a Manhattan coffee shop, and she told me what it was like working with legends from the start of her career. This has never been published.
I am teenager, hear me roar. Live, performed on the T.A.M.I. Show (1964), a legendary concert and film on which the young Rolling Stones had to follow James Brown at his peak. Besides Brown and the Stones, Gore’s performance is the one that always struck me as the best, amid a range of other stars including the Beach Boys.
Wayne Robins: How did you come to work with Quincy Jones, and the formidable arranger Claus Ogerman, who had worked with Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and other giants of pop, jazz, and classical music?
Lesley Gore: "It's My Party" hit, so it was time to do an album with "cry" songs. Quincy had some ideas, a song called "l Understand," which I had never heard before and I loved. "Cry Me A River," of course, I'd known and I loved. In those days, you recorded albums more to support your single.
We got three singles, I think, out of the first album, maybe two. "Party," "Judy"...because Claus and Quincy were both consummate musicians, I immediately came in on a level that was, "hey, that's the way to work." The first time I went into a studio, Quincy opened up the score, showed me where the instruments were, showed me how to read it. Claus would be writing arrangements literally in the cab on the way to the session. The copyist would be standing there...he (Claus) was absolutely the perfect stereotypical last minute-I'll-get-it-done musician, but he had a lot of savoir faire...and tremendous charm, and was a really clean, beautiful, concise arranger. It would be interesting to see what he thinks about this part of his work life, because I'm sure he did it for the money, and I think he set it up so he got a good chunk of the publishing.
WR: Does "It's My Party" stand the test of time because of the quality of the musicians you worked with?
LG: We (Quincy and I) chose "It's My Party." We were over at Bell Sound. This was when we were recording four-track. The entire orchestra was there, background singers, myself in an isolation booth. Two microphones in the studio picked up all the instruments, and that's the way it went down. Quincy and Claus 'heard' the record, they knew the sound they wanted, when they put it together.
WR: There was so little regard for rock and pop records, especially by a teenage girl, and they treated you like Sinatra!
LG: That was the caliber of Quincy and Claus' musicianship. That was the way they always worked, the only way they knew how to work. Mercury at the time had some fabulous artists, Dinah Washington being at the absolute pinnacle. Brook Benton. Billy Eckstine had great records out. Rock and roll was beginning, and they had no young people. I was an attempt at beginning to put them into the youth market. They didn't have a lot of producers besides Quincy. We hit it off, we were simpatico with jazz; I had this beginning understanding of rock and roll, and he had this vast understanding of every kind of music. He must have been 29 or 30 years old. I'm sure a lot of the musicians he worked with said, "what are you doing [with this kid]." God bless Quincy, he's always been right on the cutting edge, as well as right down the main boulevard.
WR: Mercury, as a major label must have been an interesting place to be. Did they lavish attention on you?
LG: Actually, it was more like a mom and pop. Irving Green [was] the co-founder. Morris Diamond was running promotion; Irwin Steinberg. There was a secretary or two running around, and that was it! I think they hired separate press at the time...working out of a closet. I saw the head office some months later. In Chicago, I saw they had a big office on Wacker. I was kinda young. Irving Green was a very dynamic man. We socialized, we'd go see Peggy Lee. He was quite supportive. But we were very far apart in age, but he was a very good father figure, very concerned about me.
WR: There were stories about Irving Green, who co-founded the label in 1945. Mercury and it's other labels had many, many Black artists, and Green used his pull to get some of them on The Ed Sullivan Show, and of course, he hired Quincy, who had to be the first A&R head at a "white" label. On the other hand, there were stories of mob-adjacent relationships.
LG: I came to Irving Green through Joe Glazer. Joe Glazer was the head of Associated Booking. Joe Glazer handled Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong with Joe Glazer and Irving Green represented a different kind of show business, if you will. It wasn’t quite as corporate. It was more like, "you do this for me, I'll do this for you." It had a different flavor to it. So Irving was somebody who was like a Godfather figure to me, without actually knowing that he was. Big and large and all-encompassing. Did they give me a fair deal? No. Did they give anybody a fair deal? Irving, by and large, was interested in the bottom line, as was anybody in the competitive music industry at the time.
WR: Another of your hits, "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows," was in the movie Ski Party. And it was also the first hit by a budding songwriter named Marvin Hamlisch.
LG: This was really a different time. The lyric on that was written by a gentleman named Howard [Liebling]. He was Marvin's brother-in-law. I can remember going to Neil Sedaka's house in Brooklyn, and everybody from Screen Gems [music publishing] sitting around the piano playing stuff. Great fun, really entertaining, networking in the best possible way...that's never been duplicated. People writing every day, motivated, churned and working. It was a wonderful time to be working in New York.
WR: There were other songwriters who almost stood in line to get a track even on one of your albums, which didn't sell well back then because it was still a singles business.
LG: Quincy picked up the phone and called all the music publishers. After "It's My Party," he'd say, "Lesley's recording," and all these people would come in. Toni Wine (who wrote "Groovy Kind of Love"), Chips Moman, Gerry Goffin and [future Warner Bros. Records producer and A&R star] Russ Titelman, Van McCoy. Quincy brought me two of Van's songs, "It's Just About That Time" and "You've Come Back." And I almost couldn't record them, I would just break down and cry. They'd be perfect today for Whitney Houston or Toni Braxton or Mariah Carey. Knockout incredible ballads.
"You've Come Back." Check this song out. [Gore had one of the first MP3 players, introduced by a Korean company in 1998. She gave me the headphones.] I could barely get this song out, because by the third verse, I'd be in tears...Another favorite was "What Am I Gonna Do With You" by Gerry Goffin and Russ Titelman. I got great material.
WR: I heard you were also close to fellow Mercury artist Brook Benton, who had been a Black R&B crossover artist. Didn't you tour with him?
LG: Brook Benton was a delightful man. He had a little book with him, a book about breathing...he made me read it when we were on the plane. We spent a lot of time talking about vocal technique and breathing, what it had done for him as a person, spiritually. He was a man of God at the end of his years.
WR: Are you surprised at the lasting power of your early hits, especially "It's My Party" and "You Don't Own Me?"
LG: There's something about "It's My Party" that 35 years later, people remember viscerally what they were doing, who they were dating, who their algebra teacher was...it absolutely takes me back to that moment. I know I have millions of friends out there who tell me about it, and I go, "wow, it affected another life." I didn’t feel that way when I was 16. I thought it was kind of a frivolous business because that’s how I came in...I had no idea how important the work I was gonna do was gonna be.
WR: Yet is the song an albatross as well?
LG: Well, nothing in life is all good. If it hadn't been for "It's My Party," it's more likely that I would've married the first dentist I thought I could get along with, and settled into suburbia...
Mercury was not necessarily nurturing to me or their women artists. When my string of hits was over, it never occurred to them, or to me...l could produce! I do songwriting. It was like "whoa"...it took me a couple of years (to find my balance).
WR: Though they were written by other people, and men at that, did these important hits of yours express what you wanted to say?
LG: "It's My Party" and "You Don't Own Me" were like a part of me. They told things I was feeling as a 16 - 17 year old, so they were so natural to me. If someone brought me those two songs to me today, I don't know if I could sing them because they' re dated in some way, lyrically as well as generationally.
WR: "You Don't Own Me" has grown in importance in the last three decades, thought of as a feminist anthem.
LG: That didn’t happen till much later, after Helen Reddy [and "I Am Woman," a number one record in 1972]. Then people started to put it together. And frankly, when I heard that ["You Don't Own Me"] lyric, I didn't think of it from a woman's point of view, I thought of it from a person's point of view, a totally humanist point of view. I never intended for it to have any feminist resonance. Though I'm not unhappy about either. In its way, "It's My Party" had a rebellious thing about it. Although it was wimpy in its way too, it was some attempt at kicking back. There was a defiance.
That's what most women weren't doing then. "It's My Party" established, how rebellious can a middle class Jewish girl from Tenafly, New Jersey get anyway? It was more of an imaginative thing, for the girls in suburbia to begin to get a handle on this, and for the guys in suburbia to maybe look at their girlfriends in a slightly different way.
This article originally appeared in Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins teaches at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, and writes the Critical Conditions Substack:
https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Bruno of Hollywood/public domain.
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