by Kevin Burton
The musical catalog of lyricist Jerry Lieber and pianist Mike Stoller has been described as “some of the most authentic rhythm and blues that white Jewish guys ever wrote.”
Eight years before Norman Mailer published “The White Negro,” these two transplanted easterners submerged themselves in the LA black culture and began to churn out blues songs that reflected those rhythms.
Their music contemporaries marveled.
“These two Jewish kids knew my culture better than most black people knew their culture,” said Carl Gardner, founder of The Coasters, who took Lieber and Stoller’s “Yakety Yak” to number one in 1958. “And they amazed me. I said who are these guys? How did you know to how to make music like that?”
“We thought of ourselves as black,” Stoller told the A&E documentary The Songmakers. “We were mistaken, but that’s what we wanted to be. We aspired to be black and to make the music that was black and the poetry that comes from blues music.”
Their meeting is a touchstone of early rock and roll history.
Budding lyricist Lieber needed a collaborator. An acquaintance gave him Stoller’s name. Stoller was reluctant and told Lieber he didn’t like pop songs. But when he looked at Lieber’s lyrics he changed his tune.
“He (Stoller) was a serious jazz lover and a blues enthusiast. He did love jazz and blues songs, a lot, and aspired to write them,” wrote Paul Zollo on the American Songwriter website.
“I was a snob,” Stoller said. “I was a big Bebop fan. So I thought [Leiber] would, somehow, be writing songs that I just wouldn’t care for. That I’d consider commercial, which was a terrible word among jazz musicians. Not that I was a jazz musician. But I wanted to be.”
Their legendary collaboration reflected “a bond they forged when Stoller looked over Lieber’s notebook of lyrics, and discovered to his delight, that they were all written in the old blues form; the first line of a verse repeated twice, then was followed by a rhyming punch-line,” Zollo wrote.
One of Leiber & Stoller’s earliest and most enduring compositions was “Kansas City.” That’s as good a spot as any from which to launch Coast To Coast, our summer rock and roll road trip on Page 7.
No fewer than 300 artists have recorded Kansas City. Leiber called the song “kind of an homage from us to Kansas City” which they recognized as the center for the blues and jazz music they loved.
“Count Basie put together one of his first bands in Kansas City and had the Kansas City Seven, which had Lester Young,” Stoller said. “So it was that amalgam of blues and jazz.”
“It was a breeding ground for great musicians,” Lieber said.
They wrote Kansas City in 1952 when both were 19. They released it with Little Willy Littefield on vocals on Federal Records, where label head Ralph Bass changed the title to “K. C. Loving.” It wasn’t until 1959 and the Wilbert Harrison version, with the title restored to Kansas City, that the song took off. The Harrison version had a more compelling shuffle groove, Zollo wrote.
“Kansas City was our first big hit,” Stoller said. Most consider it their biggest. As was typical of Lieber and Stoller throughout their career, they had a professional disagreement about it.
“I sang “Kansas City” to Mike like I sang “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.” Lieber said. “And Mike said, ‘Yeah, I like that, but I don’t want just a blues shout. I wanna write a melody to that. I want to write kind of a jazz-blues oriented melody for Basie, or someone like that.’”
“With a tune, so that if it’s played instrumentally, people will recognize it as that song,” Stoller said.
“I said, “I want it to be a blues shout,” Lieber said. “I don’t want it to have a predictable melody, some jazz melody. I want it to be a blues, I want it to be really raw, I don’t want it to be phony.”
“He said, ‘Well, who’s writing the music, you or me?’ I said, ‘Well, I guess you are.’ So he wrote the music, and it became the big standard that it became,” Lieber said.
“We’ve had a disagreement about everything since 1950, Stoller said, laughing but not joking.
“Our relationship is the longest running single argument in the entertainment business,” Lieber said. “But I think out of those confrontations come very good work.”
Stoller was right about the feel of the tune. Little Richard, The Beatles and others covered the song as a blues shout. The Beatles version in particular is junk, the kind of filler stuff you might have to play in Hamburg because you had to fill ten hours every night.
The song refers to the corner of 12th street and Vine, a hub for black culture in Kansas City then and now. The singer vows to go to KC looking for love.
“I’m going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come. They got some crazy lil women there and I’m gonna get me one.”
“I was born and raised in KCMO in the Wayne Minor Housing Projects on 12th street which was only blocks from 12th & Vine,” wrote R. James, a reader responding to the Songfacts article about Kansas City. He said his mother worked at a bar called The Orchid Room at 12th and Vine.
“The area 12th street between Paseo and Woodland was a pretty happening place. Lots black-owned businesses that seemed to be doing very well. Besides the Orchid Room there was several bars, cafes, shoeshine and barber shops,” James wrote.
“There was a drug store on the same side of the (street as the) Orchid Room but on the corner of 12th and Paseo. Across from there was the Castle movie theater and a Milgram Grocery store. I say all this because it was one of the few places where black folk could walk around freely and enjoy themselves without being mistreated.”
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