Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las: 'I Put a Lot of My Own Pain' Into 'Leader of the Pack'
- edgarstreetbooks
- Feb 9
- 2 min read
‘200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs’ Book Excerpt
Frank Mastropolo
The Shangri-Las have been cited as an influence on 1970s punk rockers Blondie and the New York Dolls. The group set itself apart from the girl groups of the 1960s by wearing skin-tight slacks and spike-heeled leather boots to promote a tough-girl image. Their first hit, “(Remember) Walking in the Sand,” reached the Top 5 in 1964. Its follow-up, “Leader of the Pack,” was a №1 hit later that year.
“Leader of the Pack” was a dark tale of teen love and angst that ends in a deadly motorcycle crash. It cemented the group’s gritty persona although the Shangri-Las in 1964 were teenagers who formed at Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, NY.
The group was originally two sets of sisters: lead singer Mary Weiss and Betty Weiss and identical twins Marge and Mary Ann Ganser. Betty Weiss left the group in late 1964, leaving the Shangri-Las as a trio.
“Leader of the Pack” was written by husband-wife songwriting team Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry and producer Shadow Morton. “Mary was the lead of the Shangri-Las and to my recollection, she was about 16 years old when she sang the lead of that very dramatic song,” Barry told WGBH.
“I think we told her it was a real story and somewhere there was this young man laying dead in a coffin who actually got killed on a motorcycle because he couldn’t be with his girl.
“I have this picture of me sitting in the studio across the mike from her with tears streaming down her face as she emoted a great performance. A song is really a script for a singer as a script is for an actor. It didn’t happen to her but you sure believed she was the one who stood and screamed, “Look out, look out, look out!”
“I put a lot of my own pain into that song,” Weiss explained in The Telegraph in 2007. ‘I don’t think teenage years are all that rosy for a lot of people — they certainly weren’t for me. They are the most confusing time of people’s lives and there is a tremendous dark side to the record, which I think teenagers related to. The studio was a great place to let the pain out.”
Frank Mastropolo is the author of 200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs, part of the Greatest Performances series. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.
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