Steyn’s Song of the Week :: SteynOnline

Since it became a vexed question for American judges and the Leader of the Opposition at Westminster and any number of MPs, I’ve found myself wandering around singing those declarative anthems from a more confident time, “I Am Woman (Hear me roar)” and its near namesake from a decade or so earlier:

I can wash out forty-four pairs of socks and have them hanging on the line
I can starch and iron two dozen shirts before you can count from one to nine
I can scoop up a great big dipper full of lard from the drippins can
Throw it in the skillet, go out and do my shopping, be back before it melts in the pan
‘Cause I’m A Woman
W-O-M-A-N
I’ll say it again…

There are better known Leiber & Stoller songs – “Hound Dog”, “Stand By Me”, “On Broadway”, “Spanish Harlem” – but I have a personal reason for picking “I’m A Woman” which I’ll come to a little later. I can’t claim to have known Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller well, but there was a period in my life when I ran into them fairly regularly. I used to get invited to a fair few social events hosted by Ascap – the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers – to honor this or that songwriter or observe some significant anniversary. There was still a lot of the old guard around in those days – Mitchell Parish (“Stardust”), Gerald Marks (“All of Me”), Burton Lane (“On a Clear Day”), Jule Styne (“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”), Sammy Cahn (“My Kind of Town”)… My kind of guys, but they were getting up there in years. And at most of these gatherings the youngest big-time songwriters in the room would be Leiber & Stoller. “They get us in to represent the Voice of Youth,” Jerry Leiber, a mere whippersnapper pushing 60, told me with a chuckle over one such dinner.

He was sitting on my right. Sammy Fain, the multi-Oscared composer of “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and “Secret Love”, was on my left. Phil Collins was also among our company. No disrespect to a pleasant fellow but Phil was my least favorite songwriter at the table. And Sammy Fain was my favorite, if only because it’s hard to argue with “I’ll Be Seeing You”. But in between came Leiber & Stoller. They’d been writing together since Michael Stoller was a freshman at Los Angeles City College and Jerome Leiber was still at Fairfax High. Both loved rhythm’n’blues, and they had, for a couple of white kids in California, the novel idea of writing r’n’b hits for black performers. Two years later – 1952 – Charles Brown gave them their first hit with “Hard Times”, and Little Willie Littlefield made the first recording of what became known as “Kansas City”, and Big Mama Thornton sang “Hound Dog”. And that’s how easy it was.

Leiber wrote the words, Stoller the music, and the result was a rare combination – songs in the rock’n’roll vernacular musically but with strong lyrical ideas, arresting imagery, and droll rhymes. (Chuck Berry had some of the same qualities in his lyrics, but his tunes were never as good.) Leiber told me he liked vignettes: something specific was happening some place in particular. Hence, “Riot In Cell Block Number Nine”. Nine was his lucky number: He recycled it in “Love Potion Number Nine”, and he relocated the “Cell Block” to “Jailhouse Rock”:

The warden threw a party in the county jail
The prison band was there and they began to wail
The band was jumpin’ and the joint began to swing
You should’ve heard those knocked out jailbirds sing
Let’s rock
Everybody, let’s rock
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin’ to the Jailhouse Rock…

Indeed. In “Jailhouse Rock” and other Elvis hits, Leiber & Stoller had the measure of rock’n’roll: Its fans wanted the frisson of danger, but without it being actually life-threatening (as, say, gangsta rap was in the Nineties). The song that embodies their approach to the early Presley teeters magnificently on the brink of self-parody:

If you’re lookin’ for Trouble
You’ve come to the right place
If you’re lookin’ for Trouble
Then look right in my face…
Because I’m eeee-vil
My middle name is Misereeee…

As my old colleague Tony Parsons once noted, if you took Elvis up on his invitation to look right in his face, you couldn’t help noticing he was wearing a little too much mascara. But it did the trick. Jerry Leiber could do the why-must-I-be-a-teenager-in-love stuff if he had to, but he preferred to have an angle on it. For example, one of the most memorable opening couplets of any early rock song:

I took my troubles down to Madame Ruth
You know that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth
She’s got a pad down at 34th and Vine
Sellin’ little bottles of
Love Potion Number Nine…

Ah, so that’s what’s bugging the guy:

I told her that I was a flop with chicks
I’d been this way since 1956
She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign
She said ‘What you need is
Love Potion Number Nine…

And I love the way Leiber wraps up the song:

I had so much fun that I’m goin’ back again
I wonder what will happen with
Love Potion Number Ten.

So do I, but we never found out. The Sixties showed up, with the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and every man his own singer-songwriter. And, if you’d been a flop with chicks since 1956, you could no longer depend on specialized songwriters to help you out of your problem. Leiber & Stoller might well have moved on anyway. There had always been something of a theatrical quality to Leiber’s lyrics, and Mike Stoller was showing signs of wanting to expand musically beyond his original love of r’n’b. Broadway beckoned. But the beckoning’s the easy bit. Getting there is tougher. They worked with Mordecai Richler on a musical version of his most popular novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, but it died out-of-town. The songwriters and novelist did not get on. Leiber told me he felt Richler despised the form and was only doing it because he knew hit musicals made a ton of money, yet he couldn’t be bothered learning what he needed to know in order to get to the loot. Conversely, Richler told me, late one night, that, after one difference of opinion over a scene, he sneered to them, “What do you guys know? You haven’t had a hit in twenty years.” Which wasn’t true. There was “Stuck In The Middle With You” for Stealers Wheel (and later Reservoir Dogs) [CORRECTION FROM STEYN CLUBBER MICHAEL WELSH: Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan wrote it, but L&S produced it], and “Pearl’s A Singer” for Elkie Brooks, and “Ruby Baby” for Donald Fagen…

In lieu of Broadway, they took to writing pop songs in a neo-cabaret style – what one reviewer in The New Yorker called “bittersweet with Germanic overtones”. The apotheosis of this approach was their boffo sub-Brechtian nihilist dirge for Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?” No, it wasn’t. Miss Lee liked it so much she made an entire album of Lieber & Stoller songs, and had plans for more. It was never entirely obvious to me that Peg and L&S were well-matched. Personally, I prefer the breeziness of Peggy Lee doing “I Love Being Here With You”, and the Coasters doing all the Leiber & Stoller songs without the Germanic overtones. But, for whatever reason, L&S adored Peggy, and, if she never quite reciprocated, she certainly gave them a lot of her time.

There is one Peggy Lee/Leiber & Stoller collaboration that belongs in the first rank of either party’s achievements. It wasn’t a big pop hit at the time – 1962 – but, unlike most of the hit parade, it stuck around:

I can rub and scrub this old house til; it’s shining like a dime
Feed the baby, grease the car, and powder my face at the same time
Get all dressed up, go out and swing til four a.m. and then
Lay down at five, jump up at six, and start all over again
‘Cause I’m A Woman
W-O-M-A-N
I’ll say it again..

If you consult the pop reference books, you’ll usually find Peggy Lee’s version referred to as a “cover” of an “original version” by Christine Kittrell, a goodish r’n’b singer:

Miss Kittrell made her record a few months before Miss Lee made hers, and she certainly liked to tell people that Lieber & Stoller had written it especially for her. She was a large lady – at the time 300lbs or thereabouts, she said – and, after seeing her on stage, Jerry Leiber had written:

I got a twenty-dollar gold piece says there ain’t nothing I can’t do
I can make a dress out of a feed bag and I can make a man out of you
‘Cause I’m A Woman…

On the other hand, Mike Stoller’s son Peter (who very skilfully remixed the Peggy Lee Sings Leiber & Stoller album a couple of years back) says it’s not clear his dad and Jerry Leiber even knew who Christine Kittrell was. As Peter Stoller tells it, the song came from an aborted musical written with Richard Bissell, co-author of The Pajama Game. All I know is what Jerry Leiber said while sitting next to me at dinner that night. He and Stoller had conceived the song as a response to a Bo Diddley number from a few years earlier:

I’m A Man
I spell M-A-N
Man
All you pretty women
Stand in line
I can make love to you, baby
In an hour’s time…

They should use that for Viagra commercials. At any rate, compared to Bo Diddley’s somewhat narrow preoccupations, the protagonist of the feminized version is considerably more versatile – housekeeper, cook, nurse, mother, doll, swinger, seductress, and budgetary wiz:

I can stretch a greenback dollar bill from here to kingdom come
I can play the numbers, pay the bills and still end up with some….

Lieber’s great, long, wordy lines culminating in Stoller’s bluesy slurs are made for a Christine Kittrell. You could easily imagine Aretha Franklin spelling it out as she subsequently spelled out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”. But instead the writers had in mind Peggy Lee – “the funkiest white woman alive,” as Leiber put it in his autobiography. They made a demo and sent it to Dave Cavanaugh, Miss Lee’s producer at Capitol. They never heard back. A few months later, Mike Stoller’s skimming The New Yorker and sees a review of Peggy at Basin Street East that says the highlight of the set is a song called “I’m A Woman”. He figures it must be an entirely different number with the same title, and decides he ought to catch the show. Halfway through, she sings the song he and Leiber sent her all those months ago. Afterwards, he goes backstage, introduces himself, and, after a longish wait, is shown into her dressing room and presented to Miss Lee as the composer of “I’m A Woman”. “Lovely song,” she says sweetly, and shows him the door.

The following morning, Stoller called Dave Cavanaugh, who explained that Peggy was planning to record the song for Capitol, but, as at Basin Street East, with just a rhythm section. The composer felt this would weaken the song’s impact and talked Cavanaugh into adding a trumpet and sax. Stoller wound up writing a hurried horn chart for the session himself. And at the end of it they had a record:

I got a twenty-dollar gold piece says there ain’t nothing I can’t do
I can make a dress out of a feed bag and I can make a man out of you
‘Cause I’m A Woman
W-O-M-A-N
I’ll say it again
I’m A Woman
W-O-M-A-N
And that’s all.

Which was pretty much how Jerry Leiber felt: That’s all? Or as he later put it: Is that all there is? “I thought she’d missed the point of the song,” he told me. “She just sat on the beat.” But, fresh from rock’n’roll and rhythm’n’blues, he’d missed the point of Peggy Lee. She’s the Count Basie of female vocalists: she doesn’t have a powerful instrument, but, after ten minutes of anybody else wailing and ululating and flaunting their melismas, you realize that Lee’s is more. She can sing the blues because she can communicate the feeling thereof rather than merely the mannerisms. And, when she does open it up a little, that’s all you need. This is my favorite quatrain on the record:

If you come to me sickly, you know I’m gonna make you well
If you come to me all hexed up, you know I’m gonna break the spell
If you come to me hungry, you know I’m gonna fill you full of grits
If it’s loving you’re liking, I’ll kiss you and give you the shivering fits
‘Cause I’m A Woman…

It’s the best written verse in the song, but I love the way Miss Lee holds the front of “shivering” just enough to let you know what she’s got in mind. She was a difficult person, and increasingly so in later years, and sometimes she treated Leiber & Stoller like great friends and valued collaborators and other times she treated them like two pieces of garbage. But, either way, she was a rare talent, and that was enough. “I loved her,” said Jerry Leiber. “I even loved her big ass.” We all did. She was woman, W-O-M-A-N.

Years later Mike Melvoin, Peggy’s pianist, told them that on his first day on the job he’d been handed a mountain of song demos and told to pick out the good stuff. “I’m A Woman” was the only one he liked. Around the same time, halfway across the country, someone had done the same for Christine Kittrell, but she got to the recording studio while Miss Lee was still running it in at Basin Street East.

A zillion gals have done it since: Freda Payne bluesily, Reba McEntire countrified, Bette Midler, Wynonna… It was our old pal Maria Muldaur, however, who took it highest up the pop chart – Number Twelve in 1974:

Unlike most of the post-Peg chanteuses, at least Maria has her own point of view on the song.

But the reason Jerry Leiber and I wound up talking about it at that songwriters’ gathering is because of the version I’d heard a few minutes earlier. It was a long and somewhat shambolic evening. Phil Collins had gotten some kind of award and made a rather charming speech. And then Ascap’s president Morton Gould had offered a few words about Irving Berlin and other matters. Gould was an affable chap and a composer of not unpleasing orchestral music, but he was the world’s worst public speaker and, after 20 minutes or so of shapeless rambling, he’d pretty much sucked the life out of the room. At that point, Leiber & Stoller were invited up on stage to do a medley of their hits – and boy, did we need them. Stoller sat at the piano, Lieber handled most of the vocals. They did all the biggies – “Stand By Me”, “Yakety Yak”, “On Broadway”. And then they got to “I’m A Woman”. You can’t really masculinize it – Sammy Davis tried with the Basie band, singing it as “She’s A Woman” and pretty much killing it dead:

Johnny Cash tried a different tack, but I’m not sure he isn’t pretty much superfluous to requirements here:

So instead Jerry Leiber just delivered it as written:

I’m A Woman
W-O-M-A-N
I’ll say it again…

And he did. I remember him doing a little up-and-down semi-curtsey on the chorus lines, whether in parody or as an involuntary tic I’m not quite sure. But he got a huge cheer when he got to the bit about making a dress out of a feed bag and making a man out of you, and deservedly so. It was the highlight of the evening, and, in all the years since, whenever I hear “I’m A Woman”, I always see Stoller at the piano and Leiber bobbing up and down. “Jerry always enjoys singing that,” said Mike Stoller, afterwards. Why wouldn’t he? He was the M-A-N who wrote “I’m A Woman”, so you might as well let the world know.

One more to close: If you heard Emma Kershaw singing carols on our Christmas Eve special, here’s the other side of Emma, on a fairly scary Brit telly show called Loose Women, letting rip with Mazz Murray and Gina Murray:

~If you enjoy our Sunday Song of the Week, we now have an audio companion, every Sunday on Serenade Radio in the UK. You can listen to the show from anywhere on the planet by clicking the button in the top right corner here. It airs thrice a week:

5.30pm London Sunday (12.30pm New York)

5.30am London Monday (2.30pm Sydney)

9pm London Thursday (1pm Vancouver)

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